Ithaca College Data in the Classroom

Featured Document

Health Data 09 Application

National Surveys

The college collects data from each of these surveys

• The National College Health Assessment
• The CORE survey of alcohol and drug issues
• The "CIRP" survey of incoming freshmen
• The NSSE survey of student engagement

Featured Documents

Health Data Examples

Learning Objectives
Why use data about Ithaca College students in classroom exercises? It can make routine data analysis exercises more interesting and engaging. It can promote conversations about course topics relevant to students. It can increase student competence in basic data analysis.  

The Data
Several national surveys are regularly administered at Ithaca College. They include information on health behaviors, alcohol and drug beliefs and behaviors, student engagement in learning and in co-curricular activities, and first-year student attitudes on social and political issues. Particular sources include:

• The Core Alcohol and Drug Survey and the National College Health Assessment, national surveys that have been administered by the Health Promotion Program over the last 5 years. For more information about these surveys and text of the questions, see the web pages of the National College Health Assessment and the Core Institute.
• The CIRP survey of incoming students is conducted at Ithaca College every second year. It is a survey from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, founded by Alexander Astin, and it has been administered for decades. Questions deal with attitudes on social and polital issues. The survey can be downloaded from the link at the CIRP site.
• The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) includes questions on kinds of learning experiences, kinds of activities in and outside the classroom, and attitudes toward the institution. The surveys can be viewed through the link at the NSSE site at Indiana University. The project is directed by George Kuh.

To Obtain the Data
Please submit a brief proposal about your intended use to Susanne Morgan at the Center for Faculty Excellence. Your proposal should indicate the kind of activity you plan, its general learning objectives, and the format in which you would use it. (Excel, SPSS, etc.) If you are interested in only certain sets of questions, please indicate so that we can create a partial dataset. The data is housed in Institutional Research and there might be a delay in obtaining the datasets if the data you request has not already been formatted for faculty and student use.

Examples of uses of the local data are linked here.

• Steve Sweet created a module using health data in Introduction to Sociology: the PowerPoint presentation is here.
• Elia Kacapyr created an assignment using health data in Econmetrics and published a paper with a student about it: pdf to download here.
• Susanne Morgan created a presentation and exercise using CIRP data and software called Student CHIP: PowerPoint here and Instructions here.

For more information about possible uses of the data, contact Susanne Morgan, Center for Faculty Excellence. For information or ideas about the health data, contact Priscilla Quirk, Coordinator of Health Promotion and Substance Abuse Prevention.

The 2009 Health Data in the Classroom Program offers two stipends. download application on the right.