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Do OU Students Work Too Much?

Do OU Students Work Too Much?. Using NSSE Data to Improve University Policy. Reuben Ternes OIRA October, 2011. OIRA What?. OIRA Office of Institutional Research and Assessment We have lots of cool data about OU students.

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Do OU Students Work Too Much?

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  1. Do OU Students Work Too Much? Using NSSE Data to Improve University Policy Reuben Ternes OIRA October, 2011

  2. OIRA What? • OIRA • Office of Institutional Research and Assessment • We have lots of cool data about OU students. • Our primary job is to conduct research about OU students, and to disseminate this information to the campus community. • We’re also in charge of some assessment related activities. • www.oakland.edu/OIRA

  3. What Kind of Research? • We have two primary types of research • 1) Surveys • Graduation Survey • Student Satisfaction Surveys • NSSE (Nessie) • CIRP • 2) Internal Research • Do our need-based financial aid policies improve retention rates? • Should all students take 16 credits their first semester, regardless of their ACT score? • Do students that get AP credit for the first course in a sequence have just as much success as students that take the entire sequence here at OU?

  4. What Else Does OIRA Do? • We also compile the university’s official statistics. • Student Profiles (i.e., who are OU students?) • Retention Rates • Graduation Rates • Progress to Degree • Enrollment data • Degree data • Distribution of Grades • All of this information is available on our website: • www.oakland.edu/OIRA

  5. CIRP Survey • Cooperative Institutional Research Project • The CIRP Survey asks students a whole bunch of questions. • Mostly about behaviors, attitudes, values, and expectations. • But also covers some demographic data. • The survey is taken just as students start (usually during orientation). • Mostly, we find that we are more similar to other institutions than we are dissimilar.

  6. Drank beer during high school year

  7. OU students’ political views

  8. College Engagement • College student survey that assesses the extent to which students engage in educational practices associated with high levels of learning and development • Administered every two years. • OU has shown steady increases in NSSE results since 2005 • More data is available on OIRA’s website. • All data is for 1st year students unless otherwise noted. National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE: pronounced ‘nessie’)

  9. Time Spent preparing for class 11-15 Hours Per Week 6-10 Hours Per Week

  10. Quality of Relationships with Other Students Friendly & Supportive Unfriendly & unsupportive

  11. What Can NSSE Tell Us? • Full NSSE results are displayed on our website. • It’s super fun to explore • And it can help with various class projects. • For Example:

  12. Another Way of Looking at the Same Data

  13. Is Working Off-Campus Bad? • Periodically, OIRA releases some of its internal research, in a format that we call ‘Spotlight on OU.’ • All of our Spotlights can be found online. • One of these Spotlights uses NSSE data to show the relationship between retention rate and the number of reported off-campus working hours for freshmen students. • There are 4 main findings that I want to talk about today.

  14. Finding #1 • Is there a relationship between first-year retention rates and off-campus working hours? • Not really. Or, if there is, the impact is relatively small. • (2007 & 2009 NSSE Data)

  15. Finding #2 • Is there a relationship between off-campus working hours and the rate that students return with sophomore status? • Yes. (χ2(7) = 14.7, p < 0.05) • Students that work more hours do not appear to accumulate as many credits.

  16. Finding #3 • Students that reported more working hours, also reported taking less credits during their first term. • This isn’t really very surprising.

  17. Finding #4 • What about GPA? • The report indicated that there did not appear to be a relationship between off-campus working hours and student GPAs. • Unfortunately, I didn’t report that data, so I can’t really show it to you today.

  18. So, Do OU Students Work Too Much? • The main issue with students that work many hours, is that their progress towards graduation is significantly slower. • Instead of taking 4 years, they take 6. • Some research (both internal and external) suggests that accumulating credits too slowly may ultimately deter students from completing their degree. • It is difficult to know the life situations of all of our students, so, the question above might not be answerable. • However, from a university perspective, we want to encourage students to complete as many credits as they can, each semester. • Internal research also suggests that, when we set higher expectations, students tend to meet those expectations.

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