The Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) and SCC’s growing participation in the League for Innovation in the Community College triggered and continue to shape SCC’s Quality Enhancement Plan.

Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE)
League for Innovation and Surry Community College

Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE)

SCC’s Quality Enhancement Plan was driven in part by results gathered from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement. CCSSE is designed to provide information on learning-centered indicators of quality for community colleges. The items that make up the survey focus on practices identified by research as important to student learning, student growth, and student retention. The survey elicits student perceptions and opinions regarding their college experiences—how they spend their time; what kinds of work they are challenged to do; how they assess the quality of their interactions with faculty, counselors and peers; how the college supports their learning; and so on. The survey was constructed to serve the following purposes:

The first open administration of CCSSE occurred in the spring of 2002. A total of 48 community colleges participated in the first administration. Surry Community College was in this initial group. The survey was administered to 637 SCC students in 50 spring semester credit classes selected in a stratified random sampling procedure. Results for SCC depicted higher levels of satisfaction in comparison to 15 other small colleges that participated in the spring 2002 administration. Surry results were even higher when compared to the group of all CCSSE colleges. Results indicated those items where differences between the Surry mean rating and the mean rating for other small colleges was statistically significant at the .001 levels. Significant differences were used to determine areas where Surry was either outperforming or under performing as compared to all other small colleges who participated in the spring 2002 field test. These results were utilized as starting points for focus group discussions pertaining to strategies for improvement of student learning.

After the survey was administered, but before the College received its results, SCC faculty were asked to indicate how they would like for Surry students to respond to each item as “if Surry Community College were exactly as you would like it to be.” After receiving survey results, faculty opinions were compared to actual values provided by students. In particular, the comparison depicted a discrepancy between student reports and faculty perceptions regarding the extent to which Surry students were engaged in higher order/critical thinking skills. Overall results indicated that SCC faculty believe students should be engaged in critical thinking skills to a much greater extent than actual levels reported by students.

Faculty met on Monday, August 12, 2002, to discuss CCSSE results and to rank order faculty priorities for more actively engaging students in the classroom. During focus group sessions, faculty identified three areas from CCSSE results they considered critical for enhancing student learning and targeted these areas for improvement: 1) working on a paper or project that required integrating ideas or information, 2) receiving prompt feedback from instructors on student performance, and 3) contributing to class discussions.

Working in groups of three, faculty developed strategies or activities to promote improvement in each of the three areas. It was the consensus of eleven of fifteen faculty groups that end-of-class projects or papers should be required. The remaining four groups recommended that writing across the curriculum should be encouraged or enforced. Among the most frequently occurring recommendations were development and support of linked courses, learning communities, cross-discipline projects, and capstone course projects, and critical thinking activities across the curriculum. Several groups suggested that the College provide faculty development opportunities for a variety of themes including student assessment, collaborative learning, and critical thinking.

Following the faculty focus groups, the Council for Innovation and Student Learning, the Steering Committee for SCC’s Quality Enhancement Plan, met to discuss CCSSE and focus group results. Council members expressed their belief that student projects that provide assessment feedback on institutional learning outcomes could add significant value for students by illuminating and repeatedly reinforcing core skills that run throughout the entire curriculum, thus providing a common language and set of objective standards that could be applied across the curriculum. The Council agreed to research integrative approaches for assessing class projects. Such an approach was supported by SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) sessions conducted during spring 2001 by the Dean of Arts & Sciences. The 2001 SWOT analysis depicted a strong interest in developing pilot projects assessing students’ writing and critical thinking skills.

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League for Innovation and Surry Community College

The League for Innovation also played a critical role in the formation of Surry’s Quality Enhancement Plan. The League has been called the “most dynamic organization in the community college world” by Change magazine and is “an international organization dedicated to catalyzing the community college movement. . .” In 2000, the League launched its Learning College Project, identifying twelve Vanguard Learning Colleges “committed to collaborative work on developing in their institutions an ever more powerful and effective focus on student learning” (McClenney, 2003). The SCC Learning Initiative replicates aspects of model learning colleges recognized as Vanguard and Champion Colleges by the League for Innovation.Surry representatives first attended a League conference in 2001, one year before CCSSE was administered on campus. Conference attendees, who now serve in key leadership roles for the Quality Enhancement Plan, became increasingly excited about the possibilities of such innovations at Surry. This timely introduction to the learning college model and the League’s commitment to innovation and collaboration helped direct the structure of SCC’s Quality Enhancement Plan. The League’s Learning College Project's five strategic objectives were amended to become the three objectives of the SCC Learning Initiative. Faculty members and administrators continue to attend and present at League conferences.

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