“For the latter challenge, the National Research Council’s (NRC) statement on scientific research on education expects no less: the research process itself is “highly contested territory,” often producing equivocal and non-durable results, explored via multiple methodologies, and clarified in periodic “syntheses of research findings…” (2) Understandably, the organization and integrationContinue Reading
[W]e wished to recover the thoughts of early practitioners who – with an intellectual freedom and honesty to consider the possibilities of institutional research at its origins – recognized the need for an authentic institutional research apparatus to empower a scientific community for the study of higher education settings. InContinue Reading
“More profoundly, Tyrrell entertained no illusion about the particularity of an institution of higher education, “the center of confluence for many social forces.” In Tyrrell’s nascent theory, the institution is most definitely not an object, a prison house of institutional research, but a field that unites cultural and material phenomenaContinue Reading
“[E]very student has an array of different probabilities of success that varies for every institution in the country. Little is known how these differential probabilities of success are distributed across institutions because opposition to institutional accountability and multi-institutional research has effectively constrained institutional research to the local outcomes at particularContinue Reading
Rather than quibble over the distinctions and priority of basic research over applied research, is it not possible to conceive institutional research as social scientific research agencies, dispersed geographically and culturally, that are capable of being partners in a collaborative enterprise with a focused and balanced portfolio of scientific researchContinue Reading
