A research team at the University of California is about to launch one of the most ambitious studies of the student experience ever undertaken.
Beginning this week, students who entered UC Davis and UC's seven other undergraduate campuses as freshmen in fall 1998 and fall 2001, and as transfers in fall 2000 and fall 2001, will be invited to respond to a questionnaire asking them to reflect on the conditions and ways in which they are engaged in the academic and cultural life of the university.
Some 60,000 students will be sent an e-mail message from UC President Richard Atkinson informing them of the project and urging their participation. This will be followed by e-mailed instructions on how to access the survey online, where they will be able to complete the 30-minute questionnaire.
As an incentive for their participation, students who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing for $100 bookstore gift certificates (10 of these for each campus). A single grand prize of $2,002 will be awarded to a student participant within the UC system.
The survey is part of a major research project on the Student Experience in the Research University in the 21st Century (SERU21). Established in summer 2001, the project is based at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley and is a collaborative project involving all of the UC campuses. The first phase is jointly funded by the UC Office of the President and by campus student affairs divisions on each of UC's undergraduate campuses.
The objective of the larger project is to develop new data that can assist policy development and improve the undergraduate experience and to create a new resource to promote scholarly research and reflection in this field.
More broadly, UC, with its eight and soon to be nine undergraduate campuses, is viewed as a significant laboratory for investigating the changing nature of undergraduate education in a major American research university.
The larger study will include a survey instrument and a large-scale qualitative research component to investigate the condition and changing nature of undergraduate education.
The survey component is aimed at developing new data on how students make use of the opportunities and resources of the university. In the words of Atkinson's invitational letter, "The results of this project will help us make the undergraduate experience at the University of California as valuable and fulfilling as possible."
The survey is being administered by the new Social Science Survey Center at UC Santa Barbara.
According to Richard Flacks, faculty principal investigator on the project and a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, the survey is innovative in several ways.
"It is a major experiment in the use of online surveying to connect with entire student bodies and learn about how they view their lives as students." he said. "It provides the institution with important benchmark data for examining how students of diverse backgrounds are affected by their experience and by social changes.
"We hope to work with large numbers of those who respond to this survey in the future to examine the outcomes of their time in college. And we hope to create an exceptionally rich set of data resources for policy-making and further research."
Institutional research directors and managers from each of the eight undergraduate campuses are actively involved in designing and administering the survey. A 16-member oversight committee advises the project.
Beginning Wednesday, eligible students were able to access the survey by going to http://research.survey.ucsb.edu/ucues/.
For more about the student experience project, see http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/seru21/.