All Posts Tagged With: "National Survey of Student Engagement"
Small Canadian universities smart to team up
‘U4 League’ highlights benefits of eastern schools
Mount Allison University (Jessica Darmanin)
If you’re a high school student in Alberta or Saskatchewan, I bet you can’t tell me where Bishop’s, Mount Allison, Acadia or St. Francis Xavier are located. That’s a shame considering they’re all ranked in the top half of their category in the Maclean’s University Rankings.
The presidents of all four institutions have just announced a new group they’ve formed, the U4 League, which will spread the word out about these lesser-known campuses located in rural New Brunswick (Mount A.), Nova Scotia (Acadia and St. FX) and Quebec (Bishop’s).
The U4 isn’t just about spreading the word. These presidents want to provide more opportunities to their students than are currently possible with populations of fewer than 4,500 students apiece. They also want to share information to cut costs.
Continue reading Small Canadian universities smart to team up
Is the block program too demanding?
Investigating why so many Quest students seek counselling
Jose Colorado at Quest U.
It’s 8:35 a.m. on January 24th. I have 25 minutes before class starts, but I already know this day will be a struggle. My eyes are worn out and my hair is greasy and unkempt. I haven’t slept right in nearly three days and I’m stressed. The lingering question reappears in my head. Is Quest University’s block program right for me?
Quest is a private, not-for-profit, liberal arts and sciences university located in Squamish, British Columbia and it is the only university in Canada entirely on a block program. That means classes are capped at 20 students and only one subject is taught at a time, every weekday for three hours over a three-and-a-half week period. Students are expected to complete around five hours of homework or research every day outside of class for a total of eight hours of work daily. Although many students are able to excel under the block plan’s intensity, others—like me—are thrown into a mental war of attrition, struggling to survive. This made me wonder: Is the mental toll worse at Quest than at traditional universities without block plans?
How well do Canadian universities follow best practices?
Results from the National Survey of Student Engagement
The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) asks first- and senior-year students dozens of specific questions about how they spend their time in and out of the classroom. NSSE is a study of best educational practices and an assessment of the degree to which each university follows those practices.
The NSSE results are headlined by the Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice, created by NSSE to compare performance across all universities—Canadian and American. These benchmarks focus on five key areas: level of academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experience, and supportive campus environment. The higher a school’s scores from student responses on the five benchmark topics, the better the chance, according to NSSE, that its undergrads are learning and getting the most out of their university experience.
The following charts show the NSSE benchmark results for 2012. We have listed the universities in descending order of achievement, according to their senior-year scores. Note: a broken bar indicates that the results for that university exceeded the scale used in our chart.
Select a chart below. On the next screen, place your cursor over the chart and click to enlarge.
How students rate their experiences at 62 Canadian schools
Results from the National Survey of Student Engagement
Click on the charts below to see results from the 2011 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a study that university administrators pore over each year to find out how their students are learning. Both first and senior-year students have answered questions that illustrate how well their universities performed on the five Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice: level of academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, active and collaborative learning, enriching educational experience, and supportive campus environment. You may be surprised about who’s on top. It’s not always the same schools that rank highly in the Maclean’s University Rankings.
Select a chart below. On the next screen, place your cursor over the chart and click to enlarge.
-
- Active and Collaborative Learning
-
- Enriching Educational Experience
-
- Level of Academic Challenge
-
- Student-Faculty Interaction
-
- Supportive Campus Environment
Canadian university considers radical change
Find out why some students are opposed
Algoma University photo by Ontario MTCU
Back in first year, I remember realizing that the hardest part of university isn’t the lab reports, the chemistry midterms, or the 1000-word essays.
It’s when they’re all due within three days of each other. Before you can even begin learning the material, you must learn how to juggle five course’s worth material that always comes due at once.
That problem could be eliminated for future students at tiny Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, which is debating switching to a block plan where students would be taught one course at a time, rather than five at once.
The block plan looks like this. A semester’s worth of calculus is compressed into three and a half weeks, with classes taking three or four hours each day, followed by four or five hours of homework. After a few weeks, there’s an exam. Then students move directly to the next course.
Continue reading Canadian university considers radical change
Which students work hardest?
Business? Engineering? Arts? You may be surprised.
Courtesy of NSSE. Click to enlarge.
Engineering students have been known to curse friends in other majors. That’s because they often spend hours sitting in their residence rooms sweating over near impossible differential equations while their non-engineering roommates leisurely read a couple chapters and then head out to party.
Then again, ask an arts major how hard they’re working and they’ll start rattling off the number of essays they have due.
But finally, it’s settled. Engineering students study more. The new release of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) shows that North American Engineering students spend 19 hours per week, on average, preparing for class. Arts, humanities and biology majors study 17 hours per week. Social science and business students study only 14 hours.
But don’t assume all non-engineers are slacking. Business students study the least, but they aren’t socializing any more. Instead, they work seven hours more per week at paying jobs. In fact, if you add jobs and study together, business students work the most—30 hours per week. Social sciences students work the least overall (27 hours). Engineering students are in the middle (28 hours).
NSSE, considered the gold standard of student surveys, involved polling of senior year students at 683 U.S. and 68 Canadian institutions in 2011. It had a response rate of 33 per cent.
