Institutional researchers (IRs) at higher education institutions fulfill a crucial role in identifying, processing, and disseminating data to administrators. Identifying effective ways for leaders to make sense of data is essential to advancing the most critical institutional issues, including achieving equitable student outcomes. However, leaders…

This study examined how African American male community college presidents made meaning of their transformative leadership experiences. A semi-structured interviewing technique was utilized to collect data from seven African American male community college presidents. All interviews were transcribed using an Interpretative Phenomenological…

We describe a semester-long project for an introductory statistics class that studies the broken windows theory of policing and the related issues of race, policing, and criminal justice. The most impactful feature of the project is the data-collection phase, in which students attend and observe a public arraignment court session. This "Court…

This Intersegmental Data Partnerships Resource Guide, and the accompanying PACE policy brief (see ED591080), are products of a year-long qualitative research project exploring promising practices in data sharing and data use among intersegmental partnerships throughout California. This Resource Guide provides institutions engaged in intersegmental…

Much of recent research in postsecondary developmental education leaves the distinct impression that most remedial courses in community colleges are unsuccessful in helping students and that they should be entirely overhauled. Legislators and administrators are now taking these recommendations very seriously and are ready to cut programs that are…

Using a newly developed software application entitled "The Community College Transfer Calculator"[C], this article both quantifies the effect of specific course-taking patterns and stresses the need for an easy to understand tool for community college academic advisors, faculty, and students. The "Calculator" calculates the…

College completion rates in the U.S. are stubbornly low despite the large and rising returns to a college degree. Efforts to increase student success in college have largely ignored a potentially key factor: the instruction that students receive in the sequence of courses that add up to a college education. Improving the quality of instruction may…

Never before has the link between a college education and postgraduate job prospects been more important. College graduates are employed more often and, on average, earn significantly more than those without college degrees. During recent years, as students have moved into a challenging job market, a college education has remained the most…

Enrollment is rising across the nation's community colleges, but completion rates remain untenably low. Reformers are focusing on the importance of using comprehensive, high-quality data on student progress and completion to bring about change. A core tenet of Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count has been to embed a culture of…

The focus of this research is the conflicted nature of the lived experience of public community college academic department chairs. In many colleges, department chairs are faculty chosen by colleagues and/or administration. Once selected, chairs assume supervisory responsibilities. The duality of this colleague-supervisor role has the potential…

Colleges and universities in the United States are being challenged to assess student outcomes and the quality of programs and services. One of the more widely used sources of evidence is student engagement as measured by a cluster of student engagement surveys administered by the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University. They…

This article reports on a qualitative, interpretive case study examining how trustees, administrators, faculty members, and staff members at a rural community college understand their institution's accountability environment. Data analysis and interpretation established that participants conceptualized institutional accountability as dialogic,…

How did Washington create a clear organizational structure that assigns responsibility for each aspect of transfer policy to the group that is best suited to manage it (Kisker, Wagoner, and Cohen, 2011)? In this chapter, the authors will introduce the agencies, organizations, and entities that have played a key role in gathering information,…

The purpose of this article is to provide the necessary tools for institutional researchers to conduct a logistic regression analysis and interpret the results. Aspects of the logistic regression procedure that are necessary to evaluate models are presented and discussed with an emphasis on cutoff values and choosing the appropriate number of…

Federal education policy in recent years has encouraged state and local education agencies to embrace data use and analysis in decision-making, ranging from policy development and implementation to performance evaluation. The capacity of these agencies to make effective and methodologically sound use of collected data for these purposes remains an…