The Advantage of Historia | Research:
The institutional effectiveness and research offices in higher education increasingly find their personnel taxed by more frequent and more complex requests for data from internal and external agents. Typically, as institutions aspire to become more data-driven, executives and administrators initially respond as if the shortest path to data-driven or evidence-based decision-making is the rapid accumulation of more data. In such conditions, the productivity of institutional researchers and assessment officers is increasingly subject to data requesters with no demonstrated track record or skill set for using data in evidence-based decision making.
“More data” often proves to be an ineffective path to enhancing decision-making at an institution when research, assessment, and effectiveness are not already ingrained in its culture. Such institutions will find data readily available, but different units or divisions will come forward with different measures on the same subject matter. Subsequently, the effort to improve decision-making comes to a standstill as constituents debate which data are reliable. In fact, internal resistance to data-driven decision-making first asserts itself in the form of skepticism regarding data validity, sometimes succeeding when the participants sour on improvement efforts after concluding that “our data” are not accurate or comparable to other institutions.
Rather than more data, better research methods offer the more clear path to data-driven and evidence-based decision-making in higher education. Institutions often fail to understand this point when research responsibilities are delegated to administrators with little experience conducting social scientific research or no facility for acting on institutional assessment results. The more efficient means to continuous improvement and the advancement of institutional missions is to augment the research expertise and the agency of institutional effectiveness and research offices. The heads of such offices provide unique expertise to the higher education mission and become key change agents when empowered to design institutional research portfolios, provide direct in strategic planning, and lead institutional effectiveness initiatives.
Here are our keys to successful institutional research and effectiveness in 21st-century higher education.
Recognize the Foundations of Institutional Reporting
Education scientists and higher education professionals design the specifications for submissions to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to advance work of the National Center for Educational Statistics and academics who utilize the vast data resources provided by the federal government. Institutional research offices that diligently follow the intent and guidance of the IPEDS instructions are generating the most reliable and valid descriptive statistics about student success and institutional effectiveness at their local colleges and universities. As a matter of their daily operations, institutional effectiveness and research officers direct their offices to certain degree as if bound by the parameters and rigor of social scientific research.
Annual reporting, then, affords institutional researchers ready access to reliable and valid descriptive statistics defined by independent experts and comparable to statistics provided by other institutions. Understandably, institutional research offices have been positioned to become the power users of the most common statistics to measure performance in higher education. The organic evolution of responsibilities is evident in the monikers appended to institutional research offices more and more often in recent years: planning, assessment, effectiveness, analytics, etc.
Systematically Build the Local Infrastructure to Advance Institutional Planning and Improvements
The organic evolution of institutional research offices often occurs in response to the demands of external agents such as accreditors or college rankings publications. Data-driven and evidence-based decision making, on the other hand, depends on how the institution purposefully builds its research, planning, and effectiveness infrastructure, internally, to support continuous improvement for student success and the mission of the college.
Data and file specifications for IPEDS and other annual submissions provide the parameters for local data sets containing the record-level outcomes of students at the institution. With a social scientific approach to data submissions and the relatively inexpensive statistical analysis software packages available, institutional effectiveness officers are able to create longitudinal data sets on the entire student body, first-time full-time freshman cohorts, certificate and degree completers, and human resources, to name areas of research specific to federal reporting.
These longitudinal data sets are the primary instruments for better planning with fact books, trend analysis, or benchmarks on institutional performance with peer institutions. When paired with knowledge of higher education literature, public policy, and market conditions, the strategic data sets and comparative of the institution enhance strategic planning through the process of environmental scans to identify external exigencies or exploratory research to define institutional gaps in service and student success.
Augment Local Research Expertise for Institutional Effectiveness
Beyond the benchmarking and trend analysis that permit executives to understand how well their institutions perform in the past and present, a full-service institutional effectiveness and research office will empower executives to make evidence-based decisions on the most effective means to improve performance in the future. Such an office provides mission critical expertise to define how interventions can be assessed reliably, to statistically analyze assessment results, and to prioritize action steps that will have the greatest impact on student success and continuous improvement.
Based on the priorities of their institutions, effectiveness and research offices enhance the quality of institutional research in any number of areas based on their professional expertise, including data visualization to gauge progress to planned goals, predictive analytics for enrollment and retention projections, survey research design to understand student engagement or satisfaction, and assessment design to measure student learning outcomes and effective teaching practices, to name only a few areas of specialization open to IE professionals.
Leadership to Foster a Culture of Assessment
Better research requires better clients of research at the institution. In an organization with a short history or uneven adoption of assessment practices, non-research administrators will struggle to improve their units’ decision-making without the proper mechanisms to guide planning and assessment. A comprehensive institutional assessment plan and a grant application strategy provide two key mechanisms to integrate institutional effectiveness officers in continuous improvement efforts. The design and implementation of institutional assessment plans or grant research insures that the administration engages in better research on the results of initiatives and become more deeply involved in the practices of assessment.
To achieve these outcomes, however, an institutional effectiveness and research officer must also transform his or her office from the traditionally passive role of “responding to requests for data” into active agents to manage change and build a culture that values research and assessment. Ultimately, the demand for better research requires institutional effectiveness officers to become leaders capable of providing the vision for continuous improvements in service to the mission of their college or university and the voice to clearly articulate the priorities of strategic planning and assessment.
Summary
The above represent a brief summary of the transition entailed when an institutional research office purposefully adopts the responsibilities of an institutional effectiveness office.
Historia | Research partners with institutional effectiveness and research officers to define the vision for their offices and to cultivate a culture of planning and assessment in higher education. Our solutions are designed to build local infrastructure and expertise for institutional effectiveness and planning.