Special Features

Talking about the dataConsider the following two quotes. The first reflects the purposes of traditional learning outcomes assessment:“Assessment asks the question regarding what students know and how they came to k...

Many years ago, at a former institution, I was in a back room deciding which countless old files could be discarded to make room for new ones. I was a new hire and eagerly used this time to learn some institutional histo...

The American Council on Education (ACE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced in February 2022 that they would partner on reimagining the Carnegie Classifications. As part of that agreemen...

What Is Strategic Analytics?Strategic analytics is a relatively new concept for institutional research and effectiveness in higher education. Currently, a small number of universities have adopted “strategic analyt...

I remember well my first AIR Forum. The year was 1997 and the Forum was in Orlando. I was relatively new to institutional research (IR), and the convergence of so many IR people at the national meeting was both exhilarat...

Although the COVID-19 pandemic forced a temporary shift in focus, we now see a return to further development and implementation of advanced technologies and broader uses of Big Data in education and other work sector...

Although several studies have examined diversity and inclusion in higher education, they have largely overlooked online colleges and universities. Online education has become more popular due to the COVID-19 pandemic and...

The few of us in this world who have endeavored to hone our skills and talents in the field of institutional research (IR) do so with the thought that ours is a truly unique profession. I mean, if one thinks about it, th...

One of the primary responsibilities of offices of Institutional Research (IR) is responding to ad hoc requests for data on students, faculty, and staff at their institutions. Some of these ad hoc requests are for persona...

In a recently published article in AIR Professional File (Sturgis, Marchand, Miller, Xu, and Castiglioni, 2022), I, along with my co-authors, introduce generalizability theory (G-theory) to institutional research (IR) pr...

Recently, the federal government asked institutions that received Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) funding to report data for year two of the reporting cycle. The request this year included multiple items t...

Performance management and professional development are frequently discussed interchangeably, yet one is a reflection on the past while the other is forward looking. When I think of performance management, I think ab...

A former provost, who is now a college president, told me that IR is “The Keeper of Truth.” This seems logical, as IR should be the point of contact for both internal data analysis and external data repor...

When I hear “data and analytics culture,” I immediately think of the work Jason Simon and his team are doing at the University of North Texas (UNT). Jason Simon, Ph.D., Associate Vice President of ...

When I began working in the field of institutional research (IR) in 2010, my daily tasks consisted of completing some externally mandated reports and a few ad hoc internal requests. Today, there are daily data requests, ...

The AIR community mourns the loss of Alexander Astin, who was a pioneer of student experience research and theories and professor emeritus at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies. He passed away May 18 ...

Significant ethical scandals are thankfully rare in institutional research and effectiveness (IR/IE). Every few years brings a case of an institution that has deliberately falsified data, usually data for external survey...

Back in fall 2006, I had barely started my career in the IR/IE field, and our oldest child was starting her first year in Governor’s School in Virginia. One of her assigned books was How to Lie with Statistics by...

The full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our students, prospective students, faculty, and staff is not yet known. Institutional research professionals can help support a better understanding of this impact by first r...

When the AIR Board approved the AIR Statement of Ethical Principles in September 2019, COVID-19 wasn't a blip on anyone's radar. Those were halcyon days, when the most popular dashboards tracked student success and enr...