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Spring 2001 Contents

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Do You Do What You Say You Do?
A new study gives Beloit College a resounding confirmation of its teaching philosophy.

Today, there are college guides for everything. Numerous publications promise to help readers select the “best” colleges, schools for specific majors, and those that are good for ethnic groups, women, religious organizations, and even political leanings. Then there are the “Internation-al 50,” the “Liberal Arts 50,” and the annual list of the “Top 10 Party Schools.” These are publications that college administrators love to hate, repudiating the poorly conceived and ignoring inconsistencies in those offering high rankings for their institutions.

But now along comes a different kind of study, one that deals with “the student experience.” It examines what colleges make available to students—how students are engaged in the educational process and what they get out of it. This study has been a long time coming.

Called the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), the project is supported by the Pew Charitable Trust and co-sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning. The study was conducted by the Indiana University Center for Post-Secondary Research and Planning as an annual survey of students in the first year and final years of their undergraduate education (www.indiana.edu/~nsse).

Beloit College was cited as one of only four schools in the project to place in the top 20 percent among all colleges and universities in the country in each of five categories, or “benchmarks.” The benchmarks in the study are designed to “refocus our attention on aspects of college quality that really matter in student learning.” (The study does not rank the colleges and universities it examines.)

In the foreword to the report, Russell Edgerton, director of the Pew Forum, and Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, indicate that this study “has come along just in time. The landscape of higher education is rapidly changing. As college becomes evermore indispensable for ordinary Americans, pressures for accountability are building. Competition is increasing and new providers are entering the higher education marketplace. But what will colleges and universities be accountable for? On what basis will they compete?”

The study depends very little on statistical controls like endowments and library resources. “Knowing the size of a school’s endowment or students’ average test scores is not much help to faculty and administrators who are committed to improving the undergraduate experience,” the report notes. Rather, the focus of the study is on the current state of student involvement in the educational process.

In an article for the online publication PureAdvice, William Flanagan, Beloit College vice president for student affairs and dean of students, notes that “... the data, for the first time, provide valuable insight into what type of learning environment you might find at an institution you are interested in. From my point of view, this kind of information is invaluable for students who really put a premium on learning and makes it possible for them to select the kind of environment which helps them learn best.

“I am pleased with the results of the study, which confirm what I have known about the educational experience students can expect at Beloit,” he adds. “It is nice to be recognized by the national media for educational excellence, but it is infinitely more important to me that our students feel very strongly and positively about their educational experiences and that we are doing things they value.”

Responses to the 40-question survey, completed by 63,000 students nationally, were used to establish five benchmarks in higher education:

• The level of academic challenge in areas regarding preparation for class, the use of higher-order thinking skills, and the intellectual climate on campus.

• Active and collaborative learning, including everything from class participation to outside class discussion and community-based projects.

• Student interaction with faculty, targeting timely and sensitive feedback and discussion, and involvement in research with faculty.

• Enriching educational experiences that allow students to reach out to and encounter others from diverse backgrounds, while extending opportunities for field work and study beyond campus.

• The campus environment, looking at how students thrive academically and socially while coping with non-academic responsibilities.

The study’s findings come as no surprise to academic and student affairs administrators at Beloit, because the College has traditionally placed a strong emphasis on these areas.

Beloit’s academic programs—from the First-Year Initiatives Program through writing-intensive requirements, to opportunities for applied learning—support its mission.  An 11:1 student-faculty ratio (with 79 percent of classes having fewer than 20 students) and commitments to both collaborative learning and independent study ensure that student-faculty interaction is strongly promoted. Beloit is also one of the most international and diverse colleges in the nation; interchanges between students of different backgrounds and perspectives happen every day.

If learning is to be “an intellectual conversation between faculty and students,” Dean of the College David Burrows maintains, “Beloit students cannot be passive recipients of information, but must be active learners who develop ideas and test them out.

“For that reason, we are pleased to see these study results indicating that students feel they are very much engaged, both intellectually and personally, in the institution,” he says. “When I meet with prospective faculty, I tell them that the kind of teaching that goes on here is very student-centered, where we encourage students to speak out in class, challenge ideas, construct their own ideas, and work with faculty. We are not looking for people who are great lecturers, but rather people who are great seminar leaders (some of whom might be great lecturers as well). Faculty’s professional activity is very important, because it helps them become better teachers. The teacher-scholar model is crucial here.”

Teaching the Teachers

How does Beloit get this “engagement in learning” style of teaching across to new faculty? Dean Burrows indicates several ways to build on the concept.

“We do a good job keeping it clear in the search process, starting with job ads. A considerable amount of self-screening goes on in the application process. After I tell candidates about teaching and professional activity and engagement expectations, they often say ‘Yes, I love that idea. Beloit sounds like a great place to teach.’ Many say they went to a similar type of school and want to get back to it.

“When faculty come here, we help them understand the expectations and develop skills to meet those expectations. We have a faculty mentoring program where, for the first two years, new faculty members have mentors who are not in the same program (and so will not be involved in evaluations), who work with them on the specifics of teaching: how to manage the classroom; how to get students to arrive prepared; and what expectations students have. Mostly we provide feedback on how to get students involved.”

What does the chief academic officer draw from the NSSE survey? “If you ask students in a thoughtful way about what is going on, you get useful answers. In the survey results, we see that students are picking up qualities that we feel are important, and validating our ideas about effective teaching,” Dean Burrows explains. “The model of trying to make scholarship and teaching closely connected and well integrated is soundly based.”

Nature of the Student Beloit Attracts

“Active learning involves applying information, intellectual skills, and imagination,” the dean continues. “That leads naturally into the Beloit idea of ‘Invent Yourself.’ Part of what students learn is to form a sense of self.

“Students come here wanting to do something intellectual, even if they haven’t yet figured out what it is going to be. They appear less careerist in their orientation, but they are looking to get really excited about their studies. I love that they want intellectual stimulation and engagement.”

Beloit’s supportive campus environment became the focus for several national stories about the NSSE study when it was released in November, the same weekend that the College’s sophomore class gathered for its annual retreat. The event, which allows second-year students to engage in discussions about their academic and cultural experiences at Beloit, is part of a unique program that supports first- and second-year students.

According to Dean Flanagan, there is plenty to learn from the NSSE study data. “If we take each benchmark as a confirmation of Beloit’s educational process, we can answer the question we are always asking ourselves,” he says. “Yes, we do what we say we do ... and that message is coming from the students we serve.”

— By Ron Nief

Best of Show

Two years ago, Kim Frankwick was hunting for the college of her dreams, but unlike her friends, she decided not to use the popular U.S. News & World Report “America’s Best Colleges” rankings to help her choose. Instead, she used a small guidebook called Colleges that Change Lives—and ended up at Beloit College in Wisconsin. Today, the sophomore Russian major is happy—especially that she did not rely on rankings. “The quality of the teaching and learning is incredible,” she says. “I don’t know if I would have found Beloit through those rankings.”

She is not alone in wondering about such things. Each fall, as some college presidents preen over their schools’ hot new rankings, many others grouse that rankings based on measures such as the size of the campus library fail to answer the question at the heart of choosing any college: what are students on campus actually learning? ... Now arrives a new entrant that is not a ranking at all—but could one day turn the rankings game on its ear by gauging internal institutional quality based on student learning, not external data points: the new National Survey of Student Engagement … The focus: how much time [students] spent in activities that research has shown caused students to learn.”

- Mark Clayton

The Christian Science Monitor - November 14, 2000


Faculty email:

Ron Nief - Director of Public Affairs
William Flanagan - Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students
David Burrows - Dean of Beloit College

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