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Community College Survey of Student Engagegment helps institutions better serve students

Key CCSSE findings

National CCSSE report

Recognizing students' needs and measuring how well an institution addresses them are among the goals of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE). CCSSE, which recently released 2003 survey results to the public, is a tool that can help institutions better serve their students’ needs.

Research shows that the more actively engaged students are in educationally sound activities on campus, the more likely they are to learn and achieve their academic goals. CCSSE provides participating colleges with their own institutional student survey data and national benchmark data, which they can use to improve their effectiveness as learning institutions. The tool helps institutions measure active and collaborative learning, student effort, academic challenge, student-faculty interaction and support for learners. The results can also help inform policy-makers and stimulate discussion about effective educational practice.

"For the first time, using CCSSE results, community colleges have the opportunity to benchmark their own performance against that of other similar colleges and community colleges nationally," says Kay McClenney, CCSSE project director. "For colleges that take seriously the challenges of improving student learning and retention, this is an important step forward."

McClenney hopes that, because the results are public, the benchmarks also will stimulate discussion -- within colleges and among policy-makers -- about effective education practice.

The 2003 report is based on responses elicited from 63,500 students enrolled in 93 community and technical colleges in 31 states. The CCSSE Web site displays key national findings and results for individual colleges.

Among other findings, the survey revealed that 64 percent of students surveyed report that they asked questions in class or contributed to class discussions either often or very often. It also found that 15 percent of students reported often or very often discussing ideas with instructors outside the classroom, and 47 percent reported never engaging with faculty outside of class.

Members of the CCSSE team anticipate that community colleges will grapple with the findings and look for ways to improve educational practices that lead to higher retention rates and enhanced levels of student learning. CCSSE is conducting an annual workshop in conjunction with the international conference of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) at the University of Texas. The NISOD conference is the largest annual gathering of community college faculty.

On the policy side, McClenney hopes to increase decision makers’ understanding of the challenges that community colleges face.

“We want to help them find ways to create policy conditions that make it not only possible but inescapable for colleges to attend to quality issues.”

CCSSE is supported in part by a $1.47 million grant from Lumina Foundation for education.



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