Abstract

Given increasing calls for higher education to promote students’ civic and political engagement, the Consortium for Inter-Campus SoTL Research (CISR) was established to facilitate cross-campus data collection for civic engagement and pedagogy research.  CISR’s inaugural project, the National Survey of Student Leaders (NSSL), is the first effort to rely on scholarly insights about the role of voluntary associations play in political socialization to systematically assess the quality of the learning experiences provided by student clubs and organizations. The NSSL provides higher education institutions with the means to regularly assess whether civil society on campus promotes the priorities of the civic engagement movement. This article relays findings from the first wave of the NSSL, while increasing familiarity with the type of campus-level data available from this new assessment tool.