This chapter captures the mission and spirit of the California State University in its efforts to institutionalize undergraduate research and support the success of students traditionally underrepresented in higher education.

This chapter describes a framework to guide collaboration between institutional research and other campus offices. Three examples are then provided to illustrate how the framework was applied successfully to actual projects.

Higher education has been a favorite news topic for months. President Obama and the first lady have entered the national conversation, particularly around issues of cost and graduation rates for low-income students--addressing education in the State of the Union, at White House events, and in speeches across the nation. In the midst of these…

This chapter describes how data analysis and data-driven decision making were critical for designing, developing, and assessing a new academic program. The authors--one, the program's founder; the other, an alumna--begin by highlighting some of the elements in the program's incubation and, subsequently, describe some of the components for data…

In reconsidering the three "tiers of institutional intelligence" needed for effective institutional research practice he first offered 20 years ago (Terenzini in "Res Higher Educ" 34:1-10, 1993), Terenzini suggests that those forms of intelligence retain their overall relevance today, but that they also require some important redefinition. The…

Efforts to develop common higher education data standards are expanding both within and across countries. The institutional research (IR) community plays a critical role in assuring that these efforts capture the diverse manifestations of the postsecondary and tertiary education systems and promote responsible comparisons. This chapter provides…

Social network analysis (SNA), with its distinct perspective on studying relations and its exceptional capability to visualize data, should be embraced by institutional researchers as a promising new research methodology complementary to inferential and exploratory statistics. This article introduces SNA through discussion of three analytical…

In an educational context, the accurate determination of each student's socioeconomic status (SES) is important for planning, reporting and general institutional research. This article describes a project undertaken to develop the means to derive a proxy measure of students' SES, based on home address location and Australian Bureau of Statistics…

International cooperation and collaborations played an important role in the economic and educational development of several countries. In the 1950s and 1960s external aid was an important modality to establish cooperation between countries, especially between developing and developed countries. Cross-border activities in higher education used to…

This chapter describes how assessment of co-curricular student learning outcomes can be used as part of the institutional accreditation process and the opportunities institutional researchers and student affairs educators have to collaborate in those efforts.

Data that have been collected for specific purposes may be exploited in the service of other interests (such as institutional research), though the exploitation may have to be accompanied by methodological compromises of various kinds. As a consequence, the findings might satisfy the criterion of being "good enough" for the purposes of practical…

The upcoming challenge for higher education institutions (HEIs) globally is how to respond to an increasing variety of societal needs but with fewer public resources and increased accountability demands. In this chapter we draw attention to the central role institutional research (IR) professionals play in positioning HEIs in a competitive and…

Institutional researchers (IRs) are often asked to conduct focus groups as an efficient way to address an institutional concern or problem. Typically, IR professionals depend on external consultants and specialists to conduct these group interviews for them; however, due to recent resource constraints (staffing, budgets), they are increasingly…

Faculty and staff at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) have developed several tools to assess campus civic engagement initiatives. This chapter describes the IUPUI Faculty Survey and the Civic-Minded Graduate Scale, and reports on findings from campus-based assessment and research.

This paper examines the challenges of developing research resources for leading Vietnamese universities. The first part of the paper presents the background to the study, including literature review on the challenges to research resources development, and describes the research questions and research methods. The next part provides empirical…