Summary: Who is Dr. Alexander McCormick and NSSE? Dr. Alexander McCormick is the Director of NSSE, the National Survey of Student Engagement, and teaches in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies department at Indiana University. The survey is a preeminent tool that's been capturing important campus data for over a decade! Last year, it surveyed over 300,000 students from over 600 campuses in order to drive discussions and actions to improve positive student outcomes. Previous to his position at Indiana, he was a Senior Scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching where he served as director of survey research.Dr. McCormick earned his Ph.D. (education and sociology) and Master’s degree (educational administration and policy analysis) from Stanford University. His Bachelor’s degree is in French from Dartmouth College. Episode highlights What is NSSE? (1:28) The five key benchmarks of effective educational practice (4:40) Positive trends can happen in every type of school (8:30) The importance of starting dialogue (10:25) Why we don't do publish institution rankings (11:15) Interesting insights found in the survey (17:30) There's much more variation in engagement WITHIN a campus than variation in engagement ACROSS different campuses (20:00) The ratio of study to class is shrinking (26:11) Student involvement increases when everyone's invested (32:25) Making informed decisions (37:05) Items mentioned in the show NSSE Project DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practices) Movie: Stand and Deliver Book: Only the Paranoid Survive Book: Motivating the Middle Subscribe to podcast in iTunes Download the complete transcript
