Why create Constructs?
When examining the college experience, we are often interested in understanding something about an aspect of that experience that is fairly complicated. For instance, we know that faculty and student interactions are important to foster since they often lead towards greater gains in a number of areas in college. But if we are trying to measure this using a survey, we dont simply ask students to tell us if they interacted with faculty. We ask about many different types of student and faculty interaction because there are many different ways that students and faculty can interact. We then create sets of questions that we think encompass the types of interactions we think are important to measure. For faculty-student interaction, we ask if faculty provided students with advice and guidance about their academic programs, feedback on their academic work, and opportunities to work on research, to name a few. Although we are interested in those specific interactions in and of themselves, we a
