It may seem like stating the obvious to note that providing excellent instruction is a key priority at colleges and universities in the United States given the underlying educational mission of those institutions. However, over the past few decades, there has been a remarkable trend in these institutions towards baking greater intentionality into…

This document provides ideas for collaboration between English, Math, and credit ESL faculty and institutional research, planning, and effectiveness (IRPE) professionals in the California Community Colleges to examine local impacts of AB 705. The ideas from this document were generated and collated from regional workshops and events hosted by the…

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…

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…

The challenges involving doctoral non-completion and a lack of academic or scholarly quality are not restricted to putting the blame on doctoral candidates themselves, their supervisors or the institutions where they enrol. As candidates carry huge responsibilities when entering doctoral studies, success can be associated with an array of factors…

There is a steady line of research to understand faculty diversity and its impact on the work life quality of faculty and learning outcomes of students in the U.S. higher education systems. What makes this volume unique is that, rather than treating diversity as a static and simplistic concept, the chapter authors presented information to show…

When colleges look to compare themselves with others, they are not much different from high-school students chasing popularity: Everyone wants to be friends with the Ivy League, but the Ivy League is really picky about whom it hangs out with. Each year colleges submit "comparison groups" to the U.S. Department of Education to get…

Institutional researchers might know more about non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty than leaders on many college campuses, particularly four-year institutions and research universities (Cross and Goldenberg, 2009). As such, institutional researchers play an important role in educating campus leaders about this growing segment of the academic workforce.…

This article presents an original application of Q methodology in investigating the challenging arena of emotion in the Higher Education (HE) workplace. Q's strength lies in capturing holistic, subjective accounts of complex and contested phenomena but is unusual in employing a statistical procedure within an interpretivist framework. Here Q is…

Multilevel modeling offers researchers a rich array of tools that can be used for a variety of purposes, such as analyzing specific institutional issues, looking for macro-level trends, and helping to shape and inform educational policy. One of the more complex multilevel modeling tools available to institutional researchers is cross-classified…

This essay builds on and extends earlier research and writing that the authors have done, trying to understand how a commitment to local engagement, which is the term commonly used at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), becomes embedded in the core work of the institution. Their inquiries have been guided by social psychologist Kurt Lewin's…

Scholars have theorized and examined women's underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields for well over thirty years. However, much of this research has paid little attention to issues of racial and ethnic diversity among women, suggesting that all women have the same experiences in STEM. Women of color…

How can it be that 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, our institutions of higher education have still not found ways of reducing the higher education gaps for racial and ethnic groups? That is the question that informs and animates the Equity Scorecard model of organizational change. It shifts institutions' focus from what…

In today's accountability climate, regional accrediting bodies are requiring colleges and universities to develop and sustain a culture of evidence-based decision making and improvement. But two-thirds of college presidents in a 2011 "Inside Higher Ed" survey said their institutions are not particularly strong at using data for making decisions.…

The formal assessment of student engagement, as it has developed in recent years, is not necessarily a faculty-driven activity. Most faculty members who teach undergraduates are involved in the informal assessment of student engagement by taking attendance, observing student behaviors or expressions in class, providing feedback on assignments, and…