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Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts |
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Qualitative Research on Student Engagement Beloit College |
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The full report is available as an Acrobat document here. The summary is below. In the spring of 2004, the Office of Institutional Research at Beloit College completed a series of interviews with College seniors aimed at obtaining qualitative data regarding their experiences with engaged learning practices on campus. With the goal of enhancing understandings of Beloit's quantitative findings obtained through participation in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), interviews were structured around NSSE's five benchmarks of engaged learning and provided lengthy, qualitative information about 1) impediments and facilitators to student-faculty interaction, and the perceptions that govern such interaction, 2) students' assessments of the level of academic challenge, perceptions of the College's workload, and their strategies for managing curricular and co-curricular activity, 3) the benefits and pitfalls of their experiences with active and collaborative learning, 4) enriching educational experiences students partook of both in and out of the classroom, and 5) students' perceptions of the levels of support provided by the college in the pursuit of their academic and social development. The project's report highlights the most important findings from the analysis of over 55 hours of interview data organized by the benchmarks under which topics of investigation fell. Further contextualization of qualitative data is made possible through the examination of quantitative findings obtained by surveying the larger population of graduating seniors during the same semester. The result of this analysis is an exploration of the "how's and why's" of student engagement as they are articulated by Beloit College students, and as they are interwoven and substantiated by knowledge routinely obtained through participation in the National Survey of Student Engagement. Tracy Markusic Rokas, Director of Institutional Research & Assessment
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Return to: Engagement Project |
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