Case Study: The Pew Charitable Trusts

The NSSE was first constructed in 1998 after The Pew Charitable Trusts put together a working group consisting of leaders in higher education to discuss the quality of higher education (NSSE, n.d.). The working group discussed two measures of quality that already existed. They discussed college rankings, such as the rankings widely publicized by U.S. News and World Report, and institutional accreditation processes, as measures of quality. The Pew Charitable Trusts working group determined these measures are not enough because those ―established methods for assuring quality in higher education contain few external incentives for individual colleges and universities to engage in meaningful quality improvement‖ (NSSE, n.d., para. 2). It was recommended by the group that a data collection tool be developed to allow institutions
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The suggested ―data collection initiative‖ is what has become known as the
National Survey of Student Engagement, or NSSE (NSSE, n.d.). The Pew Charitable
Trusts charged the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems
(NCHEMS) with essentially the development of the entire survey project, from constructing the instrument, to creating a strategy for a pilot administration of the survey.
The NCHEMS put together a design team to develop a survey instrument. The design team consisted of several experts in higher education research in the areas of student involvement, student engagement, student development, and survey research. Some of the experts included on the team were Alexander Astin, George Kuh, Arthur