Conceptual Framework and Overview of Psychometric Properties

Opinions About Your SchoolThese items are on page 3 of the instrumentand represent students= views of importantaspects of their college=s environment. Thealpha coefficient for these 11 items (includingthe two items on students= overall satisfactionwith college) is .84 (Table 1). Theintercorrelations range between .22 to .65,indicating that all these dimensions of thecollege or university environment arepositively related. That is, the degree to whichan institution emphasizes spending time onacademics is not antithetical to providingsupport for academic success or friendly,supportive relations with students and facultymembers. At the same time, most of thecorrelations are low to moderate in strength,indicating that these dimensions makedistinctive contributions to an institution'slearning environment. Skewness and kurtosisindicators are all in the acceptable range.Principal components analysis of these itemsproduced three factors (Table 2) accountingfor about 61% of the total variance. The firstfactor, Astudent satisfaction with college andquality of personal relations,@ is made up offive items. The second factor is labeledAcampus climate-social@ and consists of fouritems. The third factor is “campus climateacademic”that consists of two items. Thus,students perceive that their institution=senvironment has three related dimensions.The first represents their level of satisfactionwith the overall experience and theirinteractions with others. The second and thethird are broad constructs that reflect thedegree to which students believe theprograms, policies and practices of theirschool are supportive and instrumental in bothsocial and academic aspects in helping themattain their personal and educational goals.Summary. The pattern of responses from firstyearstudents and seniors suggest the items aremeasuring what they are supposed to measure.For example, one would expect seniors to be,on average, more engaged in their educationalpursuits compared with first-year students.Seniors would be expected to score higher onmost College Activities items and reportingthat their coursework places more emphasison higher order intellectual skills, such asanalysis and synthesis as contrasted withmemorization. Among the exceptions is thatseniors reported re-writing papers andassignments less frequently than first-yearstudents. This may be because first-yearstudents are more likely to take classes thatrequire multiple drafts of papers or becauseseniors have become better writers duringcollege and need fewer drafts to produceacceptable written work. On the two otheritems, both of which are related to interactingwith peers from different backgrounds, firstyearstudents and seniors were comparable.Overall, the items on The Report appear to bemeasuring what they are intended to measureand discriminate among students in expectedways.Grades and EngagementStudent-reported grade point average (GPA)is positively correlated with the fivebenchmarks, as well as with three additionalscales that measure student-reported gains attheir institution in three areas: generaleducation, practical competence, andpersonal-social growth (See Table 3). Thesepatterns hold for both first-year and seniorstudents. These correlations likelyunderstate the link between grades andengagement, particularly for seniors,because GPA is cumulative over thestudent’s college career while engagement istypically measured over the current schoolyear. While these analyses cannotdetermine the degree to which engagementpromotes higher grades, or higher gradespromote more intense engagement, theupshot is clear: higher engagement levelsand higher grades go hand-in-hand.Framework & Psychometric PropertiesPage 11 of 26