Student Surveys Planning Group (SSPG), Wednesday, February 20, 2008 – Meeting Notes

Attending: William Banis, Ron Braeutigam, Debbie Crimmins, Susan Dun, Sally Ewing Mary Finn, Linda Garton, Bill Hayward, Jen Lawrence, Brian Nielson, Lisa Metzger-Mugg, Michael Mills, Susan Olson, Paul Schatz, Cathy Stembridge, and Sam(from Medill, attending for Belinda Clarke)

Discussion of the coordination of student surveys

Why coordinate? There is the survey fatigue factor and it does negatively affect response rates if we have too many student surveys. And, there is the issue of wanting to minimize the annoyance to students. Coordination is done in such a way that we all tend to gain from it, assuming it is possible to coordinate a growing number of surveys.

Due to changing technology, have we lost the ability to control the surveying of our students? Some surveys are conducted via social networking tools, such as facebook It is also possible to obtain email addresses from web crawlers. And, a plethora of web survey tools have made it much easier to conduct web surveys. So, we no longer have as much control as we once did.

Internally, the demand to conduct surveys has grown, perhaps because it is easier, but also because we are all under pressure or have interest in assessing students and their experiences and to seek their input.

Where does authority lie for student surveys? In the early days of the SSPG (about ten years ago), it was a smaller group of central administrators and institutional priorities were agreed upon. Perhaps it was easier because there were fewer surveys and fewer stakeholders involved. In recent years this has broken down somewhat. Why? Perhaps because it is less clear who has authority today and what the institutional priorities are and who sets them.

Communication is another issue. We could do a better job informing the Northwestern community of the SSPG and our coordination role. We have talked about this. We need a communication plan. It involves more than just maintaining our website. Perhaps we should send annual or quarterly reminders or communications to deans and to the wider community.

Communicating findings from surveys is also an issue. We are providing findings within the SSPG and assuming they make their way to the deans and other stakeholder via SSPG members. We might need to be more proactive. A newsletter, or brief consumable easily read brief reports of findings would be useful. Who does this and how do we coordinate? Could be produced and sent with the SSPG brand. Getting those reports out to the community would be important. Newswire, observer, or other avenues could be used.

In closing, we agreed that a small group should meet with senior leadership to discuss the current and future of coordinating student surveys. Of more immediate concern, we noted the significant number of student surveys being conducted this spring (see meeting agenda on the SSPG website - ) and the need for a meeting to coordinate them (it was held in early March).

Presentations

1) Presentation of Findings from the Educause/ECAR Survey of Undergraduates and Information Technology (Brian Nielsen)

2) Presentation of Findings from the Admitted Student Questionnaire (Mike Mills)

See members only SSPG webpage for copies of the presentations - . See link labeled “Student Surveys Planning Group Members Page” in the left-hand column of the page. It is netid authenticated.

Next Meeting

Scheduled for May 20th.