User-friendly online data help community colleges better serve students.
Community colleges in the United States have a complicated task that includes
providing full access to higher education (to ensure that everyone has an entry
point to higher education) and serving a diverse mix of students, including
those who are most likely to have both academic and financial obstacles to
success.
The Community College Survey of Student Engagement
(CCSSE) helps colleges
succeed in this task by providing a tool for assessing quality in community
college education. Each year,
CCSSE administers its survey to community college
students at
CCSSE member colleges and then releases the results publicly.
The survey, grounded in current educational research, asks questions about
educational practices that are positively correlated with student learning and
retention. For example, students are asked about how frequently they
participate in class, interact with professors and other students, write
papers, and read books.
Colleges use the
CCSSE results to focus on good educational practice (practice
that promotes high levels of student learning and retention) and identify areas
in which they can improve their programs and services for students.
The
CCSSE Web site is the vehicle through which
CCSSE makes all its data
public. In addition to providing national results and data for each
participating college, the site invites visitors to view data according to
criteria they select. Using the site's interactive
Search the Data function, viewers create a group based on a range of
criteria, such as small colleges, urban colleges, female students or part-time
students. The Web site generates custom graphs and tables that show survey
results for the selected group. Drill-down functions provide additional detail
about the numbers provided in the graphs."
www.ccsse.org