Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE)

Overview of the AUSSE

The Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) is a new quality enhancement activity developed for Australasian higher education institutions by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). By providing information that is generalisable and sensitive to institutional diversity, and with international points of reference, the AUSSE will play a very important role in helping institutions monitor and enhance the quality of education.

The AUSSE involves administration of the state-of-the-art Student Engagement Questionnaire (SEQ) to a representative sample of first-year and later-year students at each institution. With formative links to the 750 institution USA National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), the AUSSE provides data that complement and extend collections that focus on satisfaction with the quality of teaching and the learning environment. It thereby makes available to Australasian higher education institutions a new means for measuring and monitoring the effectiveness of learning and teaching.

The AUSSE was developed to bring together existing work in the field, and leverage benefits from a collaborative, multi-institutional approach. It is critical that surveys involve validated instruments and processes so that they provide the kind of high-quality data that can be used to improve practice. It is also critical to have meaningful points of reference to get most value from reports, along with well-tested strategies for embedding results into practice.

For more information, visit the AUSSE web site.