FAQs about the NSSE Consortium for
the Study of Writing in College
Q. What are the benefits of joining the CSWC? (move to main)
Q. We need to persuade our administration that our school should participate in the
CSWC. Any advice for how we should persuade them? (move to main)
Q. Where can I go to get answers to specific questions? (separate link in right)
Q. Will the CSWC writing questions continue to be available beyond the Spring 2009
administration? Our school is not scheduled to administer the survey until after
2009.
Q. Our school is unusual, and we are concerned that there may not be other schools
like ours with which we can compare ourselves. Can we wait to see who is in the
consortium before deciding?
Q. Can my institution add questions to the set?
Q. I notice there are 27 questions in the CSWC question set, but the NSSE
consortium guidelines specify that a maximum of 20 are allowed.
Q. Will my school’s data be shared or made public?
Q. My institution’s office of research/planning says they don’t have the resources or
time to analyze the data gathered from the writing questions. They are concerned
that we will have this data but will not be able to do anything with it. Should we still
bother?
Q. Can we analyze our results ourselves, without the help of our office of institutional
research/planning?
Q. Are there other resources for learning how to analyze our data and interpret our
results?
Q. What are consortia, “comparison groups,” and “systems,” and how do they differ?
(move to main)
---move to main—
Q: Our institution is already in a consortium or state system, can we participate in
more than one consortium or system?
Q. Why does NSSE restrict an institution to just one consortium?
Q. What are the benefits of joining the CSWC?
A. While colleges and universities have recognized the importance of writing
throughout the curriculum, it has been difficult to understand how much and what
kind of writing students are actually doing. The CSWC is designed to provide a
snapshot the writing their undergraduates do. By participating in the consortium,
schools can gather data about students' writing behaviors that would otherwise be
impossible to acquire.
Colleges and universities are increasingly dedicating new programs and resources
that focus on student writing. These changes are led in part by the recognition
offaculty, the public, and the professional world that writing ability is an essential
skill for all college graduates. In addition, the research of Derek Bok, Richard Light,
David Russell, and Marilyn Sternglass, among others, suggests also that writing
activities increase students’ engagement and learning in any course. This movement
is also driven by new concerns about students’ readiness to enter a global workforce
with multifaceted, complex demands for communicative effectiveness.
CSWC participants will receive a range of reports that idescribe students' responses
to both the NSSE core survey and the additional question set about writing.
Participants also receive the raw data, which they can use to answer their research
questions about the role of writing at their institutions. For instance, institutions can
examine the relationships between writing practices and the gains student report for
a variety of other learnign outcomes.
Benefits for first-year-writing programs and WAC/WID
programs
Paul/Chris For both first-year writing programs and WAC/WID programs,
the CSWC question set asks questions that probably align with some or all of your
program’s learning outcomes. Your NSSE results will provide an additional indirect
measure of student learning, and could help you better understand what students
are writing and how instructors are teaching writing, teaching disciplinary writing, or
using writing to enhance learning.
Benefits for departments, colleges, and other programs and
units
Individual departments and colleges can use the CSWC data to better understand the
writing practices of their undergraduates. Individual departments, colleges, and
other units can isolate the data for their students and examine their writing
practices, and can even compare their students’ responses with students overall and
from other units. If they request a special analysis from NSSE (which requires a fee),
a unit could compare their students' responses wiht the responses of similar students
from other institutions. For instance, a history department could compare their
majors to the history majors from other institutions. Some units may choose to work
with their offices of research/planning to analyze the data themselves
Benefits for the institution
Your institution’s office of research/planning is probably already aware that NSSE is a
highly regarded and increasingly influential means for assessing student behavior
and effective educational practice. If your institution is already administering the
NSSE in Spring 2009, it can participate in the consortium for a very reasonable fee
and gain an overall snapshot of students’ writing practice. These results, like all
NSSE results, can be used for benchmarking: comparing an institution with other
institutions or comparing your performance with pre-established goals.
Institutions may be especially interested in using the CSWC survey results as part of
their overall accreditation and accountability efforts. One of the most widely used
assessment products for measuring value-added learning is the Collegiate Learning
Assessment (CLA), which is designed to measure students reasoning and
communication skills by assessing students’ written responses. Institutions that use
the CLA may be especially interested in knowing what kinds of writing their students
are doing.
More Information about the CSWC
Q. Where can I find more web-based information about the CSWC and NSSE in
general?
A. The clearinghouse site for information about the CSWC is at
http://comppile.org/wpa+nsse. NSSE’s website includes several resources that can
help you understand NSSE in general and consortia.

NSSE webpage on consortia provides a general description of NSSE consortia,
what they are, how they work, how to sign up, how much they cost, etc.

Web tutorials about NSSE that you can listen to and watch are available at
NSSE’s Webinar Archives.
Q. Where can I go to get answers to specific questions?
A. Email one of the following people with your questions.
DOES ANYONE OBJECT TO HAVING THEIR EMAIL ADDRESS POSTED HERE?
 Chuck Paine, Coordinator of the Consortium, is an associate professor of
English at the University of New Mexico. He’s the consortium factotum. Write
to Chuck with general questions. If he can’t answer your question, he’ll direct
you to the person who can.

Paul Anderson, Consortium Collaborator, is Professor of English and Director
of the Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami
University (Ohio).

Chris Anson, Consortium Collaborator, is University Distinguished Professor of
English and Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North
Carolina State University. Chris is a national leader in WAC/WID and
assessment.

Paul
Chris
Bob Gonyea, Associate Director of NSSE in the Center for Postsecondary
Research, Indiana University-Bloomington, can can answer questions about
Bob
NSSE, data analysis, policy and procedures, and other stuff.
, I think
that actually we shouldn’t even list you here. I don’t think you want people
calling you with data analysis questions, do we?

Dan Bureau and Tony Ribera serve as managers for the consortium process.
They can answer questions about consortium policies and registration.
Dan/Tony

Client Services Project Associates: Each institution is assigned two project
associates who work as a client services team to provide support during your
NSSE administration. You can view your institution’s project associates at
http://nsse.iub.edu/html/staff.cfm.
Client Services Manager Jennifer Brooks manages client services and can
direct your question to the appropriate person at NSSE.
Q. Will the CSWC writing questions continue to be available beyond the Spring 2009
administration? Our school is not scheduled to administer the survey until after
2009.
A. There would need to be a consortium for the year you’re administering NSSE. The
questions would not go away, but a single school could not use them alone; this is a
NSSE rule. We can’t predict whether other schools would be interested in creating a
consortium for 2010, but we think there’s a reasonable chance because many NSSE
consortia continue across several years, because the CSWC has broad support from
both the Council of Writing Program Administrators and NSSE.
Q. Our school is unusual, and we are concerned that there may not be other schools
like ours with which we can compare ourselves. Can we wait to see who is in the
consortium before deciding?
A. Yes. You can wait to enroll in the consortium until the closing date, October 5,
2008. If you write to Chuck Paine, he can we can tell you which institutions have told
him they are enrolling.
The CSWC Question Set
Q. Where can I find the question set?
A. You can get a PDF of the set of 27 questions at
http://comppile.org/wpa+nsse/docs/27_Question_Supplement.pdf.
Q. Can my institution add questions to the set?
A. No. All member institutions of a consortium agree to use the identical question
set. More questions could frustrate student survey takers and might lead to a drop in
participation. Also, although your data will not be made public unless you choose to
do so, all the data goes into an aggregate pool; if institutions added questions, the
data would be rendered less commensurable.
Q. How was the question set developed?
A. It was developed through a multi-year collaboration between NSSE and the WPA.
The WPA collaborators included more than 70 professors with expertise in writing
program administration, writing across the curriculum, writing in the disciplines and
writing-center theory and practice. Before and during the 2007 WPA Conference,
these WPA collaborators created over 100 questions that were collapsed, refined,
focus-grouped and finalized by a smaller team. More information about the
development of the question set can be found on WPA/NSSE web pages (which are
wrangled, designed, and maintained by Glenn Blalock at CompPile.org).
Q. I notice there are 27 questions in the CSWC question set, but the NSSE
consortium guidelines specify that a maximum of 20 are allowed.
A. NSSE has given us permission to use the entire 27-question set. NSSE limits the
number of questions because too many will frustrate student respondents and might
cause some to give up on the survey. However, this question set appears to be
relatively easy for students to complete. It was developed with the help of NSSE
directors. Furthermore, the Spring 2008 experimental administration of the question
set showed that students did not give up.
Signing up to Participate: Costs, Dates, Procedures
Q. How much does it cost to participate in the CSWC?
A. The fee for consortia participation is based on overall undergraduate enrollment:
Fewer than 4,000 $200
4,000 to 7,999 $300
8,000 to 12,000 $400
More than 12,000 $500
Q. What is the procedure for registering?
A. Institutions will be sent an invitation to register in the consortium on or after
September 5, 2008. Institutions must register by October 5.
Q. When is the signup deadline?
A. Institutions need to enroll by October 5, 2008.
Data Analysis and Data Sharing
Q. Will my school’s data be shared or made public?
Bob
A.
, will you answer this? I answered for the person who asked but I’m
sure you could do a better job.
Q. My institution’s office of research/planning says they don’t have the resources or
time to analyze the data gathered from the writing questions. They are concerned
that we will have this data but will not be able to do anything with it. Should we still
bother?
Bob/Paul
A.
There may be good reasons to participate even if your
research/planning office cannot complete an analysis of the data beyond what NSSE
provides. Your office is right that you should consider what you want to do with this
data. You will probably gain valuable information and insights from the analyses
provided by NSSE (reports arrive in early August). But it is true, as your office
suggests, that the most powerful results, conclusions, and insights can be gained
when you match NSSE student responses with the kind of data that only your
institution has access to, such as demographic data, student-success data (GPA,
persistence, etc.), and data about programs and courses pursued by students. In
short, matching institutional student data to survey data allows institutions to fine
tune their analyses and discern with writing and other student experiences are
leading to the learning, engagement, and success outcomes they are most interested
in.
Q. Can we analyze our results ourselves, without the help of our office of institutional
research/planning?
Paul
A.
: perhaps you could say briefly how an individual can do analysis
themselves. You will need their help in getting access to the data, but you can do
some analyses yourself, especially if you are assisted by a faculty member or
graduate student with experience in social-science research.
Q. Are there other resources for learning how to analyze our data and interpret our
results?
Bob
A.
: BOB you said you and Jillian were thinking about this. Have you
been able to decide? Several helpful resources are available at NSSE’s Webinar
Archives, especially “Getting Down to Basics: Working with your NSSE Data,” a twohour introduction to NSSE, its data, and uses. You could also read the 14-page PDF
“Using NSSE Data.”
Finally, if enough schools participate in the consortium, NSSE will conduct a
webinar devoted to interpreting the CSWC survey results. The webinar will occur in
October of 2009 (about three months after you will have receive your data from
NSSE) and be produced and hosted by Associate Directors of NSSE Bog Gonyea and
Jillian Kinzie. This will be a live and free webinar that you can participate in. It will
also be available on the NSSE website for later viewing.
General Information about NSSE Consortia
Q. What exactly is a NSSE consortium?
A. As NSSE explains on its website, “A NSSE consortium is a group of six or more
colleges or universities participating in NSSE the same administration year that want
to ask students additional questions that will follow the NSSE core survey.[…] You
can see the diverse functions of NSSE consortia since the survey's inception in
2000.”
Q. What are consortia, “comparison groups,” and “systems,” and how do they differ?
A. Systems and consortia are kinds of comparison groups. Consortia ask additional
questions; systems and ordinary comparison groups do not. Institutions register with
systems and consortia in the fall before the NSSE administration; they select
comparison groups in May, after the NSSE administration.

Comparison group. Your institution can choose up to three comparison
groups. Your survey results are compared to each of these three groups. As
NSSE explains, “NSSE reports display results for each institution alongside
three comparison group columns. Institutions have the option to customize
each column or select a recommended default group of institutions. NSSE
comparison groups may be customized in several ways. Contacts may identify
specific institutions from the list of all current-year NSSE participants, create
the list using institutional criteria, or begin with institutional criteria, then add
or remove specific institutions to refine the comparison group.” Examples of
comparison groups include institutions in your geographical area, in your
Basic Carnegie Classification, CHE peers, and all other schools in the nation
administering NSSE that year.

System. One of your comparison groups can be a state or university system.
Institutions can join a system at no additional charge. Systems do not ask
additional questions; if they do choose to ask additional questions, they
become by definition a consortium.

Consortium. Up to one of your comparison groups can be a consortium.
Institutions can join a consortium by paying an additional charge. Consortia
ask additional questions.
Q. Why does NSSE restrict an institution to just one consortium?
A. This strict NSSE rule is designed to prevent "survey fatigue." Each consortium
uses an additional question set. If students were asked to complete two additional
question sets, many might feel overburdened or might give up.
Q: Our institution is already in a consortium or state system, can we participate in
more than one consortium or system?
A: You can participate in only one consortium. You can participate in a consortium
and state system only if the system is not asking additional questions. If you need
clarification about a system, please contact Dan Bureau or Tony Ribera at
consorti@indiana.edu i
Q. Where can I find NSSE consortium
general information?
A. Visit this NSSE webpage on consortia.
Convincing Your Institution to
Participate in the CSWC
Q. We need to persuade our administration
that our school should participate in the
CSWC. Any advice for how we should
persuade them?
A. Here are some ideas that might work.
Choose those you believe will be
compelling for your decision makers (upper-level administrators, directors of
institutional research/planning, etc.).

Perhaps most important, follow the principles of any good rhetorician and
adapt your message to your specific audience and local situation. Explain how
participation will benefit your school specifically. Connect the benefits of
participation with specific initiatives and programs; connect to the specific
local values and goals of your school, how it defines itself in its mission
statement and similar documents; connect to the specific pressing needs and
concerns your school faces.

Connecting CSWC participation to the these typical ways that universities and
colleges use NSSE core-survey results (from page 1 of NSSE’s “Using NSSE
Data”):

Assessment and improvement

General education reform

Benchmarking

Alumni outreach

Accountability

Grant writing

Institutional research

Institutional advancement

Accreditation & self-studies

Faculty and staff development

Retention

Communication with students

Institutional communication

State system performance reviews

Educate yourself about NSSE and the CSWC.

Visit the WPA/NSSE website.

Consult the first section of this document, “Benefits of Participating in the
Consortium,” as an idea generator.

Give yourself a crash-course tutorial about NSSE. View some of the webinars
at NSSE’s Webinar Archives, especially “Getting Down to Basics: Working with
your NSSE Data,” a two-hour introduction to NSSE, its data, and uses. It also
provides numerous tips for talking with people in your college. You might also
read the much shorter 14-page PDF “Using NSSE Data.” Also, scout around
the NSSE website for information you think will be useful to you.



Consider addressing how the CSWC might address these general highereducation issues:

Assessment in general: the CSWC survey results may provide data
about writing, which is a skill that those inside and outside higher
education recognize as important; it would be difficult or impossible to
gather this data in any other way.

Accountability systems. If your school is participating in one of
accountability systems (such as the Voluntary System of
Accountability, which produces the College Portrait), participation and
results could be reported there.

Accreditation and self-studies for the institution.

Accreditation and self-studies for departments and colleges. College
deans and college directors of assessment can provide support. If your
institution has a school of engineering, business/management, or
education, those schools have professional accrediting agencies that
have increasingly stressed the importance of writing skills.

Accreditation and self-studies for other programs and units. Similarly,
if you have a new or high-profile first-year-experience program that
stresses writing instruction, enlist their involvement. Programs that
might be especially interested in using CSWC results include: first-year
experience, learning communities, WAC/WID programs, faculty
development, various colleges that have professional accrediting
agencies, administrators of large government and other grants, and
others.

National visibility by participating in a nationwide research project.
Get written or oral support from deans, chairs, program directors, and other
campus leaders. If you don’t have access to these campus leaders, speak with
person in their unit who is in charge of assessment or of faculty development.

Consider asking these campus leaders to demonstrate their support
with money. You could ask them to commit to paying for a certain
portion of the consortium fee. For instance, for the largest institutions,
the consortium fee is $500, which could be split five ways. It would be
a small but meaningful gesture of support.

Ask these leaders to demonstrate their interest by indicating interest in
oversampling their students. (NSSE’s “Oversampling Information”
defines oversampling and explains why a school or unit would
oversample.)
Remind them that participation is relatively free of risk: the cost is very
reasonable, and your school is free to do with the data as they wish, including
keeping it to themselves.