This chapter puts forth a model of student-success-focused policy development at small colleges that elucidates the role of the institutional research (IR) professional, highlighting how the breadth of roles and responsibilities that IR professionals serve at these institutions intersect with traditional training and background.

This chapter explores how critical lenses can be used to conduct transfer research and proposes a new methodological approach to understand the complex experiences and success of diverse transfer students.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of important theories and frameworks that ground research and assessment of co-curricular learning.

Item Response Theory (IRT) is a measurement theory that is ideal for scale and test development in institutional research, but it is not without its drawbacks. This chapter provides an overview of IRT, describes an example of its use, and highlights the pros and cons of using IRT in applied settings.

A new vision for institutional research is urgently needed if colleges and universities are to achieve their institutional missions, goals, and purposes. The authors advocate for a move away from the traditional service model of institutional research to an institutional research function via a federated network model or matrix network model. When…

This chapter provides an example of how one university's institutional research office played an active role in using data from institutional studies to guide the university toward courses ripe for change, faculty toward successful teaching strategies, students toward successful learning behaviors, and the university toward assessing the impact of…

This chapter frames the discussion regarding the importance of measuring co-curricular learning and the role of the IR office.

Institutional researchers come to their field from a variety of educational and work experiences. Regardless of their expertise, however, it is difficult--if not impossible--for a single researcher, or even a large team of researchers, to know and understand all the nuanced differences among the many disciplines found in a comprehensive…

This chapter focuses on perspectives of external data reporting and their implications for institutional research offices and campuses as a whole. The authors examine a variety of uses for externally reported data and explore opportunities for using these data more fully across the institution.

Higher education institutions in the United States have collected and analyzed data for decades. From mandatory reporting for state and federal compliance to ad hoc reporting for internal and external stakeholders, there are myriad business purposes for which administrators, staff, and faculty routinely gather data. As more colleges and…

The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to one of the most rigorous nonexperimental analytical methods currently employed by education researchers: regression discontinuity.

This chapter will discuss how institutional research professionals might integrate co-curricular learning outcomes into larger measures of institutional effectiveness. By mapping co-curricular learning outcomes to align with curricular and institutional goals, linkages can be made that demonstrate mission-congruent activities and outcomes across…

To whom should higher education institutions provide data, and what is the impact of transparency on institutions?

Although institutional research has been a significant feature of U.S. higher education for more than 50 years, it is not so well understood in other parts of the world. As higher education around the world faces increasingly challenging times in responding to pressures of massification and globalization, increasing forms of accountability and…

This afterword offers challenges and considerations as the assessment movement continues to develop. The author offers some simple considerations for readers to ponder as they advance their evidence-based decision making processes, and encourages others to use these methods within the context of recent neuroscientific evidence that learning and…