Evaluating Academic Challenge Beyond the NSSE

Abstract

The authors investigated student and faculty perceptions of academic challenge at their institution, based on early administrations of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). This analysis revealed that the NSSE did not fully capture many meanings of academic challenge held by these faculty and students. This study led to a proposal for the development of an internal assessment approach using a modification of the NSSE and other scale items on academic challenge and student engagement. The authors discuss several implications of this study for academic scholarship and for institutional policy concerning the assessment of academic challenge.KEY WORDS: assessment; National Survey of Student Engagement; academic challenge.State legislators, accrediting bodies, employers, parents, and faculty members continue to comment concerning the imperative of highquality learning outcomes for college students. Institutions of higher learning obviously confront these stakeholder expectations and try to demonstrate their commitment to assessing and improving student learning outcomes. As do other institutions, Georgia College & State University (GC&SU) continues to formulate strategic plans related to learning outcomes for students.GC&SU received a new mission in the late 1990s as the public liberal arts institution of Georgia, and the institution has noted significant increases over the last 5 years in its entering students' SAT scores. The average SAT for freshmen increased from 975 for Fall 1996 to 1,089 for Fall 2003. Evidence of increases in other outcomes

Developing a Student Conception of Academic Rigor

“…We concluded that the faculty perceived learning to be most rigorous when students are actively learning meaningful content with higher-order thinking at the appropriate level of expectation within a given context. The themes identified by our faculty members were consistent with those in the literature, such as the importance of higher-order thinking (Braxton 1993;Nordvall & Braxton 1996;Payne et al 2005), conceptual transformation (Cope & Staehr 2005;Prosser & Trigwell 1999;Trigwell & Prosser 1991), and transfer learning (McKeough et al 1995;Parkes 2001). The multidimensional model was effective in prompting conversation on campus surrounding ways of challenging students.…”

“…We were informed by work suggesting that the NSSE benchmarks can fail to represent campus understanding of academic challenge adequately (Payne et al 2005) and can fail to predict student outcomes accurately (Gordon et al 2008). Our previous work with faculty members (Draeger et al 2013) showed that they considered higher-order thinking (e.g., analyzing ideas, making judgments, applying theories, and synthesizing information) to be more indicative of academic rigor than workload (e.g., number of pages of writing assigned or reading required).…”

National student survey metrics: where is the room for improvement?

“…Kuh 2009). There are critics of applications of behaviourist approaches in general (Zepke 2014) and this type of survey can lead to potential confusion and disagreement by both staff and students (Payne et al 2005) and, in a wider sense, the use of educational learning outcomes in general (Murtonen et al 2017).…”

Evaluating and Motivating Faculty Performance: Challenges for Marketing Chairs

“…Public institutions that receive state funding are placing an ever-increasing importance on teaching quality and effectiveness (Doyle 2006;Gursoy and Umbreit 2005;Payne et al 2005). Individual professors are evaluated on their ability to "effectively" bestow knowledge, at the same time that financial stakeholders-boards, state legislators, school administrators-expect increased "efficiency" by processing more students for the same, or lower, costs.…”