Student Surveys Planning Group s1

Student Surveys Planning Group (SSPG)

Meeting Notes

March 16, 2010

In attendance: Nick Alena, Ron Braeutigam, Rachelle Brooks, Evelyn Caliendo, Stephen Carr, Debbie Crimmins, Mary Desler, Lonnie Dunlap, Sally Ewing, Mary Finn, Linda Garton, Tim Gordon, Hilarie Lieb, Lisa Metzger-Mugg, Michael Mills, Paul Schatz, Cathy Stembridge

Business Items

·  Surveys reviewed by the Executive Committee (Mary Desler)

o  Survey on how graduate students make career choices by Klara Mueggenburg (SESP graduate student) – Student worked with Lisa and Rachelle to make revisions to the survey. IRB approval has been attained. Survey was approved and sent out on 3/12/10.

o  Block Museum survey launched to a sample of students. Response rate is unknown at this time.

o  Non-Northwestern student inquired about surveying LGBT students. This request was denied as Northwestern does not typically allow outside people to survey students and there was no reason to make an exception in this case.

·  Roundtable update on fall surveys (response rates and one or two findings)

o  Mary Finn – WCAS advising survey was administered. This year’s emails were sent to students from their advisor and the response rate increased.

o  Evelyn Caliendo – NU strategic planning committee may be interested in conducting surveys in the future.

o  Mary Desler – Student Affairs recently administered five surveys, using incentives:

§  CORE Alcohol – 35% response rate

§  Mental health – 63% undergraduate response rate, 55% graduate response rate

§  Student union – 62% response rate

§  Student recreation opportunities – 60% response rate

§  Career planning – 72% response rate

o  Lonnie Dunlop – Career services preparing for 2010 survey. 2009 survey had very good response rate; incentives were used.

o  Lisa Metzger-Mugg – TGS conducted a survey of PhD non-completers in February. The response rate was 30%. One of the biggest reasons for not completing was the student’s relationship with their advisor.

o  Steve Carr – McCormick has conducted two surveys recently. One is a survey of alumni on their engineering career for accreditation purposes. The other is a survey on how McCormick and WCAS students chose their majors, sponsored by NSF.

o  Timothy Gordon – School of Continuing Studies will administer a student satisfaction survey in April. The 2009 survey had a response rate of 20%, up from 10% in 2008.

o  NRC Report is due this spring. Institutions will receive notice before it is made public.

·  Update on student satisfaction project including focus groups (Mary Desler, and Debbie Crimmins)

o  Focus groups will be conducted April 5-9. There will be fifteen groups, representing a variety of student demographics. Each group will have 40 students invited with an expected turnout of 8-10 students.

o  Questions are almost finalized. The same questions will be asked to every group.

o  The sessions will not be videotaped but they may be audio taped.

o  A summary report of the outcomes will be written.

·  Update on adding Enrolled Survey questions to the Senior Survey and on the conducting the PULSE Survey for freshman (Mary Finn, Hilarie Lieb, and Debbie Crimmins)

o  Mary and Hilarie talked about the background of the project. It started with Hilarie investigating possible exit surveys for WCAS. They decided that the COFHE enrolled survey was more suitable for capturing “value added” than the other surveys and they worked with Debbie to add some of those questions to the Senior Survey and to conduct a preliminary analysis on past survey data

o  The summary document on the project is available on the SSPG web-site

o  This is only one small part of assessment at WCAS. Another area that was mentioned was the mentoring group effort and WCAS has hired a graduate student to work on that project.

o  The PULSE survey was discussed and it will be conducted for Freshman this spring as a baseline

o  There was a brief discussion on survey incentives and that will be a topic for future meetings

o  Mary Desler mentioned some additional instruments that are available such as the Defining Issues Test

Presentation (see web-site for powerpoint)

·  The Graduate School Admitted Student and Exit Surveys (Lisa Metzger-Mugg)

All of the meeting materials are available on the SSPG members’ page:

http://www.adminplan.northwestern.edu/ir/sspg/index.html

If you have trouble accessing this site, please contact Paul Schatz. Note that the URL has changed, so please updated your bookmarks. Certain files do not open properly in Internet Explorer. We are working on this problem and until it is fixed, Firefox can open the files.

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