As the sector's gatekeepers, charter school authorizers are responsible for ensuring that schools in their purview set students up for success. To that end, they provide various forms of scrutiny and technical assistance, decide whether existing schools' charters should be renewed, and--perhaps most important--set the bar for the approval of new…

While much is known about faculty time allocation, we know very little about how traditional managerial factors influence faculty time allocation behaviors. We know even less about the possible downsides associated with relying on these traditional managerial factors. Using survey data from the National Science Foundation/Department of Energy…

This article is designed to give the reader a conceptual, nontechnical overview of estimation and model fit issues in multilevel modeling (MLM). The process of MLM generally involves fitting a series of multilevel models that increase in complexity. When conducting multilevel analyses, it is important to balance the need for complexity and the…

Prior research studies associated the employment of part-time faculty with student degree and/or certificate completion (Benjamin, 2002; Ehrenberg & Zhang, 2005; Jacoby, 2006; Leslie & Gappa, 2002; Umbach, 2008; Umbach & Wawrzynski, 2005). To date, institutional-level data have been utilized to investigate whether such employment…

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the conceptual, methodological, and statistical challenges in selecting appropriate peer institutions for comparative purposes. The authors' approach embraces a Western scientific tradition that physical things and phenomena can be "reduced into a set of key variables--identifiable parts--that make key…

While e-learning is now characterized by a past and trends within that past, there continues to be uncertainty about how e-learning is defined and conceptualized, whether or not we like e-learning, and whether or not it is as meaningful to us as face to face learning. The purpose of this study was to document the e-learning perceptions of students…

This longitudinal multi-institution study examines the effects of students' involvement in high school service clubs and their level of civic-mindedness when entering college on their propensity and intentions to volunteer during college. The level of civic-mindedness was measured by a self-rating of their ability to work effectively with others…

Background/Context: Recently emerged with the implementation of the California's Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999 and the NCLB Act of 2001 is an increase in the number of education production function studies estimating the relationship between educational inputs and APIs. While the majority of past research on California school…

This study provides a multilens examination of the diversity of full-time faculty in the United States across 11 institutional types derived from Carnegie classifications, by the intersection of race/ethnicity, citizenship, and gender and to make comparisons across time. Whereas few other studies have assessed faculty diversity for the for-profit…

Online education is becoming an increasingly important component of higher education. The Sloan Foundation 2010 Survey of Online Learning reports that more than 30% of all students take at least one online course during their college career. Because of this, attention is now turning to the quality of student outcomes that this instructional method…

College student self-reported gains are used frequently in institutional research and in general research on college outcomes (Gonyea, 2005). These self-report measures serve not only to identify experiences and programs associated with student growth but also to draw comparisons across colleges and universities. The vast majority of institutions…

Purpose: This study presents institutional research and aims to explore the underlying factors that contribute to hospitality management students' satisfaction and perceptions of service quality at a higher education college in Ireland. Research focusing on hospitality and leisure management education argues for greater cognisance of the relevance…

Given the high rate at which students report participation in cocurricular group experiences during college, it becomes critical to have a clear understanding of how these experiences related to both one another and educational outcomes. Existing research examined specific types of group experiences or simple involvement in general, failing to…

This methodological note illustrates how a commonly used calculation of the Delta-p statistic is inappropriate for categorical independent variables, and this note provides users of logistic regression with a revised calculation of the Delta-p statistic that is more meaningful when studying the differences in the predicted probability of an…

Using multi-institutional data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's (CIRP) annual survey of entering freshmen, the Higher Education Research Institute's (HERI) Faculty Surveys, campus registrars' offices, and IPEDS data, we evaluated the extent to which peer institutional retention climates and faculty perceived campus climates…