This chapter discusses principles that support using data about teaching and learning and offers several strategies particularly well suited for use by institutional researchers at small colleges in helping faculty, staff, and administrators use data on student learning for improvement.

Purpose: The purpose of this multimethod study was to evaluate the institutional research capacity building and infrastructure model (IRCBIM), an emerging innovative and integrated approach designed to build, strengthen, and sustain adequate disability and health research capacity (i.e., research infrastructure and investigators' research skills)…

The purpose of this oral history is to document the lived experience of the learning environment of African American students and culturally specific practices of African American teachers who taught in the legally segregated Louisville Central High School. Historically, segregated African American schools have been depicted as inferior…

Organizational relationships are complex. Employees do their work as individuals, but also as members of larger teams. They exist within various social networks, both within and spanning organizations. Multilevel theory is at the core of the organizational sciences, and unpacking multilevel relationships is fundamental to the challenges faced…

This chapter puts forth a model of student-success-focused policy development at small colleges that elucidates the role of the institutional research (IR) professional, highlighting how the breadth of roles and responsibilities that IR professionals serve at these institutions intersect with traditional training and background.

The higher education sector today faces an environment unlike any it has seen before. Serving a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders and facing diverse and fast-changing economic, social, and political pressures, universities can benefit from corporate-like approaches such as the use of analytics to inform strategic decision-making…

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.

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…