In the spring of 1995, the Student Satisfaction Inventory was administered to more than 1,000 students here at Eastern New Mexico University. In this issue, a more detailed examination of the instructional effectiveness scale is reported. The full text for each of the questions, local means and standard deviations and national comparisons can be found in Table 1 on page 4. Pages 2 and 3 contain box plots that graphically display the results.
Box plots are summary plots based on the median quartiles and extreme values.
Box plots are formed from boxes which contain the 50 percent of values falling between the 25th and 75th percentiles, and from whiskers , which are lines that extend from the box to the highest and lowest values excluding outliers. A vertical line across the box indicates the median. Generally this is consistent with all item responses with regards to importance by the ENMU sample who tend to rate all items as being important. It may be more accurate to report that these items are important, but there is more variance in the students' responses. This and previous examinations of the importance data continue to demonstrate that all items appear to be important to ENMU students.