A Study of Student Engagement : the Development of the National Survey of Student Engagement in the United States <Note>

This paper examines factors that formed the features of the concept of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) in the United States (McCormick et al. 2013). Its research questions are: Why does the concept of student engagement in the NSSE is so emphasized the behavior and time spent by students on academic work? And why it so emphasizes improving the learning environments of college. Additionally examined are the NSSE indicators, which were newly-organized in 2014, and how they changed from the NSSE benchmarks. In the 1990s, higher education in the United States faced two societal challenges. One was the necessity of developing the process indicators which could monitor the achievement of the National Education Goals, and another was the necessity of developing the metrics which could replace the college ranking issued by U.S. News & World Report. Two preexisting student surveys, the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) surveys and the College Students Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ) were proposed to meet these challenges. Peter Ewell was in charge of the development of the new survey selected the CSEQ. Robert Pace who developed the CSEQ operationally defined his central concept of “quality of effort” by the number of behaviors and student time on task. These social challenges and the academic lineage of the student survey are factors which formed the features of the concept of student engagement of the NSSE in the United States. The NSSE was revised in 2013, and NSSE benchmarks were reorganized to NSSE indicators and High-Impact Practice. The first feature of NSSE indicators was to measure advanced thinking such as the indicators of Higher-Order Learning, Reflective & Integrative Learning, Learning Strategies, and Quantitative Reasoning. The second feature was the fact that the items of the psychological elements those were coexisting at the benchmark were reorganized as their own indicators such as the indicators of Quality of Interactions and Supportive Environment. NSSE indicators extended the concept of student engagement to include the psychological elements such as the advanced thinking of student. And, they structured the behavioral elements and the psychological elements. Academically speaking, the NSSE indicators incorporate the thoughts of learning theory and teaching design to the concept of student engagement and construct the comprehensive concept of student engagement with the behavioral elements and the psychological elements which come from the student interaction and cognition