This article raises questions about the use of needs assessment by those seeking to improve the performance of organizations and individuals. While the discrepancy model of needs assessment has enjoyed a long history and is widely accepted, the author states that it has several undesirable consequences in terms of its impact. This article offers…

Teacher training programs are increasingly being held under the microscope. Perhaps the most notable of recent calls to reform was the 2009 declaration by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan that "by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of…

Surveys and benchmarks continue to grow in importance for community colleges in response to several factors. One is the press for accountability, that is, for colleges to report the outcomes of their programs and services to demonstrate their quality and prudent use of resources, primarily to external constituents and governing boards at the state…

New York's Cornell University spends millions of dollars and thousands of staff and volunteer hours to produce more than 1,400 events around the world each year. That's one event every six hours. Is it worth it? Do the 40,000 alumni, parents, and friends who attend feel closer to Cornell after these events? Do they disengage because Cornell didn't…

Never before in the history of the teaching profession has there been such a need for comprehensive evaluation of all teacher preparation programs, most especially professional development schools (PDSs). This need is driven not only by the pressures of the age of accountability, but also by the need for the PDS movement to act ethically and…

This article describes the Voluntary Support for Education (VSE) Survey, an instrument created by the Council for Aid to Education. Our objective is to explain VSE's potential value as a tool to inform both institutional and academic research regarding fund-raising activities at community colleges. Of particular interest is how the data available…

Integrating institutional research, outcomes assessment, program review, strategic planning, and accreditation can be a powerful means of creating a culture of evidence-based decision making and continuous improvement. This study examined how this "integrated" model is organized in practice, how such offices began, why this approach was chosen,…

In the modern world, higher education is transitioning from enrollment mode to recruitment mode. This shift paved the way for institutional research and policy making from historical data perspective. More and more universities in the U.S. are implementing and using enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which collect vast amounts of data.…

Evaluative statements from alumni have legitimacy with both internal and external stakeholders. Thus, alumni studies can provide valuable evidence of institutional effectiveness and lend themselves to both locally designed and commercial survey instruments for data collection. Under ideal conditions, the results of alumni studies equip faculty and…

Achieving the Dream colleges engage in a process of institutional improvement to increase student success. A central component of this process is engaging internal and external stakeholders to help develop and implement interventions or changes in programs and services that improve student success. To determine whether these interventions do…

The vast amount of research conducted on student persistence over the past thirty years is indicative of the continuing and evolving interest in retention of students. Framed through multiple perspectives, this retention research is driven by the fact that more students leave institutions without graduating, year after year. Much more than an…

Electronic portfolios (eportfolios) represent an assessment measure with strong potential to provide feedback about student performance to improve curricula and pedagogy, to determine individual students' mastery of learning and support feedback for improvement, and to actively involve students in the assessment process. This study examined the…

Program reviews became widely used as quality assurance activities in the United States beginning in the 1970s. Since then, they have evolved as an essential component in demonstrating institutional effectiveness to accrediting bodies. The paper discusses various approaches to reviews with a focus on a recently reengineered institutional program…

A discussion of administrative program evaluation addresses the problem and opportunity of evaluation from the perspective of the administrator or institutional researcher by suggesting criteria for deciding on the need for formal evaluation, examining several evaluation design strategies, and looking at how evaluation can enhance organizational…

The portfolio approach to evaluation can be a useful method of screening and comparing educational programs in terms of their productivity and potential. In the field of investments, portfolio analysis consists of identifying the relative strengths of assets in terms of the dimensions of return and potential for growth. College programs can be…