A: Since its inception in 2001, the overarching purpose of the Center has been to promote improvement in student learning and attainment, providing institutions with meaningful and actionable information about their students' educational experiences. An important companion goal is to help change the discourse about what constitutes "quality" in higher education. As a starting point in achieving this purpose, the Center administers a collection of student engagement surveys: the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) and its companion survey, the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (CCFSSE); the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE); and, the Community College Institutional Survey (CCIS).

A: No. The Center strongly emphasizes its work in partnership with member colleges—through a combination of local, state, and national institutes, conference presentations, publications, webinars and other online tools—to help practitioners understand their data and use those data appropriately in making decisions about improvements in students' educational experiences. The surveys certainly are an important part of this, but the Center's work is much broader than just the surveys.

A: The CCSSE benchmarks are groups of related items that allow member colleges to take a broad initial look at their results. The benchmarks serve as an entry point into the data, pointing practitioners toward areas where they may choose to dig more deeply, both through examination of item-level results and through exploration of the experiences of different groups of students—for example, students of color, or part-time students, or first-generation students, or students in different academic programs.

Thus, the benchmarks serve as important campus conversation-starters. The quintessential process of inquiry and discussion should be guided by what's important to the institution (Strategic priorities? Equity agenda? Accreditation-related work? Student success initiative? Development of effective classroom practice?); by that institution's realities (mission, student characteristics, resources); and by the function of the results in exposing questionable assumptions about students and their experiences.

A: The CCSSE benchmarks of effective educational practice were developed through the use of quantitative results from pilot survey administrations, along with expert judgment, to create a meaningful and useful framework for distilling a large volume of data about student behaviors and institutional practices. They were not developed as classic measurement scales designed to inform scholarly research about college students. Rather, the benchmarks serve to organize related survey items in a way that summarizes important dimensions of engagement for our institutional users. Factor analysis was used to refine—but not to define—the benchmarks.

A: There are many approaches to determining "validity." In fact, the concept of validity depends critically on how the data are to be used. Thus, in keeping with the Center's purpose of improvement of student learning and attainment, CCSSE was designed for consequential validity - that is, to produce data that are meaningful and actionable, information that is good enough to be useful in decision making. Most fundamentally, CCSSE is a tool for helping practitioners work their way through practical problems.

The examination of predictive validity — that is, the extent to which survey results are related to college student behaviors and outcomes - is a continuing process. Through the Center's own work and through analyses conducted by independent third parties, CCSSE has explored relationships between student engagement and an array of student outcomes, including GPA, course completion, credit completion, persistence, and degree or certificate attainment. A number of studies have shown positive—though generally modest—correlations. A study currently in progress examines relationships between CCSSE benchmarks and individual items and college retention and graduation rates. And a new large-scale project will contribute to the community college sector's work to identify and implement high-impact educational practices.

A: The Center's work is built on the belief that there is value in asking students about their experiences. Indeed, students are the best informants about the student experience. Evidence from focus groups and cognitive interviews suggests students understand the questions, are capable of answering them —and do so honestly, even when social pressure may exist to answer them differently. CCSSE results can therefore be analyzed and interpreted with confidence.

A: CCSSE can't assess everything, or even everything that's important in community college education. Users or special-interest groups sometimes approach CCSSE with a particular interest pertaining to the undergraduate experience. Our criteria guiding survey development are that a) content should inform student engagement; b) content should assess institutional practices and/or student behaviors, using response scales that students understand and can use with ease; c) content should be grounded in the empirical research literature; and d) the results need to be actionable—that is, point to things about which institutions can do something.

CCSSE offers institutions the opportunity to add custom items to the surveys, an option exercised by a significant portion of our member colleges, especially those that participate as part of a consortium. Further, collaborative work with other organizations and researchers has been a valued activity for the Center. That work can involve contribution of content ideas in accord with the Center's process for developing and administering special-focus item modules. Despite these opportunities, though, there inevitably will be important topics that won't be a good fit for our surveys—a reality that keeps the door wide open for others' contributions.

A: The Center's surveys produce data that serve multiple uses: diagnosis (identifying areas in which a college can enhance students' educational experiences); benchmarking (a process supporting performance improvement by providing external points of comparison to an institution's own performance); and monitoring (documenting and improving educational effectiveness over time).

The Center consistently recommends using multiple sources of evidence about students' experiences and academic progress (for example, other survey data, student focus groups, cohort tracking data, transcript data, results of student learning outcomes assessments, etc.) to inform decision making. Through Center institutes, workshops, conference presentations, online tools, and publications, we help member colleges to build their capacity for using multiple sources of data to understand and improve the quality of students' educational experiences. Key to the success of this work is broad involvement of faculty, administrators, and student services professionals in the process of inquiry and the development of improvement strategies. Persistent follow-up work to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions reinforces the process of continuous improvement.