CSHE Paper Receives AIR Award

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CSHE Paper on Research that Questions Spellings Commission Call for Student Engagement Benchmarks as Problematic Receives AIR Award

Center for Studies in Higher Education researcher Dr. Steve Chatman received the award for the best paper at the Association for Institutional Research conference recently held in Kansas City, Missouri.

Chatman is the director of the Center’s Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Project which developed and coordinates an on-line, census survey of all undergraduates at the University of California’s nine undergraduate campuses – the University of California Undergraduate Survey (UCUES). Recent results from the UCUES provided the bases of Chatman’s paper, “Institutional Versus Academic Discipline Measures of Student Experience: A Matter of Relative Validity.”

A version of the paper is available on the Center’s Research and Occasional Paper online site.

See: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=263

As noted in the paper’s abstract, UCUES data “presented an opportunity to measure both disciplinary and institutional differences in students’ academic experience. Results from nearly 60,000 responses (38% response rate) from the 2006 administration found greater variance among majors within an institution than between equivalent majors across institutions. Cluster analysis techniques were employed to establish disciplinary patterns, with traditional distinctions between hard and soft sciences generally supported.”

Chatman notes that, “Reporting practices called into question range from institutional comparisons that ignore academic program mix and discipline to campus performance comparisons that do not recognize pedagogical differences by academic major. More specifically, these results suggest that calls for comparable institutional performance measures, as proposed by the Spellings Commission, must take into consideration disciplinary differences in instruction.”

Chatman is also associated with Berkeley Office of Student Research which is part of the SERU consortium of researchers.

See http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/seru/ for information on the SERU Project, UCUES and other recent scholarly and policy based studies.

CONTACT:
Steve Chatman
SERU/UCUES Project Director
Center for Studies in Higher Education - UC Berkeley
steve_chatman@berkeley.edu

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