This case study describes a time period of 6 years in the history of a school, a period marked by crisis recovery and organizational response to a mandated large-scale reform. Despite its challenges, when speaking of this period a number of the staff reflected on it as a kind of magical moment in time. Twenty years later, I began to wonder what…

The Colorado Graduates Initiative demonstrates seven factors that must be present to build an effective statewide collaborative effort to increase high school graduation rates. These include: 1) Leadership to unite diverse stakeholders on specific, common goals and catalyze them into action; 2) A focus on data, particularly on actionable, early…

Using multi-institutional data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's (CIRP) annual survey of entering freshmen, the Higher Education Research Institute's (HERI) Faculty Surveys, campus registrars' offices, and IPEDS data, we evaluated the extent to which peer institutional retention climates and faculty perceived campus climates…

After reviewing the articles in this issue, the authors have come to four conclusions. First, the reaffirmation of accreditation, along with the selection of the quality enhancement plan (QEP) works best when all stakeholders of the institution are included in the planning process. Second, the planning process is far more complex, multifaceted,…

In most multi-campus studies of college impact that have been conducted over the past four decades, investigators have relied on ordinary least squares (OLS) regression as the analytic method of choice. Recently, however, some investigators have advocated the use of Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM), a method specifically designed for analyses…

During spring quarter 2008, the Western Washington University (WWU) Libraries established an interactive bloglike environment called "14 Days to Have Your Say" with the intention of gathering new ideas and feedback about the libraries from the university community. The environment was developed as a fairly simple Drupal site. The project…

This chapter serves as a beginner's guide to some essentials of human resource faculty data and cost data and their integration into products to facilitate institutional decision making. It begins with a brief overview of general higher education cost data concepts, followed by a similar synopsis of relevant higher education human resource data.…

Purpose: The global market for international students have become highly competitive and many institutions, particularly higher education institutions, rely heavily on fee income from overseas students. This study aims to examine the countries from which Australian education institutions draw such students and used this information to better…

The pursuit of institutional prestige has done little to improve the reputations of most colleges, and it may be causing many of them to become less distinguishable from their competitors, new research shows. In one study presented at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Kyle V. Sweitzer, a data-resource…

The purpose of this study was to identify the major science education programs in the United States, where the science education researchers published their research. This research is the first study of the scholarly productivity of science education programs at domestic institutions of higher education. Each issue of the eight research journals…

Two years after many colleges resisted attempts by the Bush administration to impose more rigorous methods of student assessment, a leading coalition of private institutions is pressing its members to adopt an increasingly popular standardized achievement test. The push to adopt the assessment comes as the test faces new questions over its…

This paper reviews the new directions in institutional research on undergraduate racial/ethnic and socioeconomic diversity at the University of California, Berkeley. The use of SERU/UCUES and other web-based census surveys has made possible more detailed and extensive analysis of student diversity. Included is research on an expanded number of…

The implementation of Lifelong Learning (LLL) in European higher education institutions is one of the most important educational and carrier development oriented initiatives of this decade. Albeit an essential path in the continuous improvement of skills, competences and knowledge throughout the life of an individual, this project is also…

This study uses a regression model to determine if a significant difference exists between the actual budget allocation that an academic department received and the model's predicted budget allocation for that same department. Budget data from a Southeastern Master's/Comprehensive state university were used as the dependent variable, and the…

A prime role of institutional research is to contextualize institutional or survey data in a clear, accurate, concise, and compelling fashion. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the strategy used by a comprehensive Canadian community college to improve the analysis and reporting of student satisfaction surveys. Although data-rich with many…