Validation of the NSSE benchmarks and deep approaches to learning against liberal arts outcomes. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education

This study examines the validity of the National Study of Student Engagement (NSSE) measures of good practices in predicting outcomes associated with a liberal arts education. Using a multi-institutional sample and a pretest-posttest longitudinal design, we find that net of student background characteristics, the type of institution attended, and other college experiences, one or more of the NSSE measures of good practices in undergraduate education consistently predicted first year development in students ’ effective reasoning and problem solving, well-being, inclination to inquire and lifelong learning, intercultural effectiveness, leadership, moral character, and integration of learning. We find that, with institutions as the unit of analysis, the NSSE measures of good practices had a number of substantial positive associations with liberal arts outcomes that persist even in the presence of controls for a precollege measure of each outcome. The findings lend support for the assumption that the widely used NSSE scales are, in fact, measuring practices that positively influence undergraduate cognitive and personal development across a broad range of outcomes