| |
View charts of NSSE results.
See results in USA Today
College of the Atlantic is ranked among the nation's top colleges and universities according to a document released today by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). The survey, sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is considered to be the most comprehensive assessment of effective practices in higher education, focusing as it does upon the forms of engagement a student experiences in college - outside the classroom as well as within.
Education experts have come to believe that the amount of time students spend actively involved with their education has a major impact on a student's overall learning. Remarkably, COA's distinctive approach to higher education closely mirrors the standards that NSSE has developed for measuring student success. Such activities as frequent interchanges with faculty members, independent research, discussing classroom topics outside of class, talking with people of different races, religions or cultures, are what NSSE regards as essential to a good education. These experiences are part of the daily life at COA.
For the third year in a row, COA ranks among the top 10 percent of all schools surveyed by NSSE. The results are gathered from a lengthy questionnaire filled out by some 313,000 students at 610 four-year colleges and universities. The survey identifies five areas of student engagement and activity: Academic Challenge, Active and Collaborative Learning, Student-Faculty Interaction, Enriching Educational Experiences and Campus Support. Among the participating schools are Barnard, Bennington, Hampshire, Marlboro, Middlebury, Vassar and Williams colleges, Georgetown and Pepperdine universities and the University of California - Berkeley.
COA particularly soared in certain essential categories. When asked about whether they had gained critical and analytical thinking skills at the college, 97 percent of seniors (and 93 percent of first-year students) said believed COA had trained them to think critically, compared to 86 percent of the general NSSE participants.
Conversely, straight memorizing of data occupies only 15 percent of a first-year student's time at COA, whereas it occupies 67 percent of the time of first-year students among the general NSSE respondents.
Integrating education is also an essential part of one's education - discussing ideas from one class to another, both inside and outside of the classroom. At COA, 92 percent of seniors said that they bring outside ideas into a class discussion, something done by only 65 percent of students at the other NSSE participating institutions.
Though a small school on the coast of Maine, 84 percent of COA's first-year students said they had a serious conversation with students of a different race, an experience reported by only 50 percent of students at other NSSE participating schools.
"NSSE is an institution's most trustworthy lens for seeing deeply into the quality of students' experiences, because its results can translate directly into plans for action and reform and transformation strategies," says Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. While COA continues to learn and improve from the NSSE results, it has found that NSSE's lens is what COA has always used to shape its educational philosophy: engaging students actively, collaboratively, using the entire college - and indeed, much of the world - as a learning community.
Founded in 1969, College of the Atlantic is a small college of some 300 students on the coast of Maine fostering interdisciplinary approaches to complex environmental and social problems. The academic program encourages hands-on, experiential learning and asks students to view the world as an interactive whole by bringing together traditional disciplines through the unifying perspective of Human Ecology.
Full details of the report can be found on the NSSE website at: http://nsse.iub.edu.
|
|
