Data quality has become a pressing issue for many campuses in recent years, as colleges struggle to extract timely, accurate, and consistent information from ever-proliferating institutional data sources in order to meet strategic decision-making and accountability demands. In this mixed methods study, a survey and semi-structured interviews were…

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.

Recent trends in the historiography of international organizations are occupied with tracing their historical impact on national contexts. There is, however, no consensus on how to conduct this type of analysis methodologically. This article examines the methodological challenges arising from this type of research. While a great deal of…

Understanding one's competitive stance in a globally competitive environment provides the requisite awareness to maintain both competitive edge and institutional responsiveness. In this chapter, three case studies are presented to provide examples of ways in which strategic scanning can enhance the academic program development process and how…

This chapter provides institutional researchers a foundation to understand workforce data and how they can be accessed and used within an institutional research operating culture. Specific wage methodologies, earnings reporting, and future directions for using wage data are provided.

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

Strong relationships with senior administrators, effective cross-campus collaboration, and efficient use of technology are central to impactful IR in small colleges.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the Ontario-led strategic mandate agreement (SMA) planning exercise. Focusing on the self-generated strategic mandates of five universities (McMaster, Ottawa, Queen's, Toronto, and Western), we asked how universities responded to this exercise of strategic visioning? The answer to this question is…

As research administrators look to define their roles as professionals, the need to address perceived administrative burden becomes a valuable next step in improving research administration. A qualitative investigation into the causes of the perceived burden identifies local variability of research administration as regulatory burden for those…

The purpose of this study is to understand the extent to which Acker's (1990) concept of gendered organizations frames extant scholarship and to explore the implications of using this framework to address gender inequities in organizational life, and particularly in academe. Through a systematic analysis of articles, we found that while Acker's…

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.

The literature on marketing library resources to distance students reaches back to at least the mid-1980s based on a simple EBSCOHost search across over 40 different databases. Authors of this study sought to develop a comprehensive understanding of what our colleagues have learned via research about this critical topic. Because the Web, as we…

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 60-Second survey (Appendix A) was a partnership between the American Council on Education (ACE) and AACRAO. Colleges and universities have invested in the use of data analytics to improve student outcomes, close attainment gaps, and improve organizational performance. As environmental conditions continue to evolve, the pressure to do so in…