Supported by emerging research and practice, this chapter provides a comprehensive conceptual framework for first-year assessment.

This chapter demonstrates that the effects of good teaching and academic challenge on leadership and psychological well-being during the first year of college differ for African-American and White students, which suggests that institutional researchers should disaggregate data by race or other relevant student characteristics when trying to…

High-impact practices, programs, and activities where students commit considerable time and effort in different settings can help to define the first-year college experience and are likely to increase success in areas like persistence, deep learning, and self-reported gains.

In this chapter findings from a nationally representative longitudinal study offer insights into how the experiences students have during their first college year affect their intention to be retained at their initial college for the second year.

This chapter will examine characteristics of first-year experience programs in community colleges, with specific attention to the extant research about their effectiveness, the ways in which research and program delivery can be integrated, and the unique challenges of delivering FYE programs and conducting research about them in community colleges.

This chapter highlights the importance of qualitative approaches to studying the glass ceiling in contrast to exclusively quantitative measures.

This chapter explores eliminating faculty-related glass ceiling effects through academic governance.

This chapter describes how software technology may be used as an interdisciplinary approach to managing diversity in higher education to mitigate glass ceiling effects.

This chapter serves as a resource for identifying selected programs and initiatives in higher education that demonstrate great promise in addressing glass ceiling effects in the workplace.

This chapter presents various considerations researchers undertook to conduct a quantitative study on low-income students using a national data set. Specifically, it describes how a critical quantitative scholar approaches guiding frameworks, variable operationalization, analytic techniques, and result interpretation. Results inform how…

The author provides a framework to help scholars in the field of higher education to be critical. Additionally, the author reflects and comments on the chapters included in this special volume. Finally, this chapter ends with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges of critical quantitative inquiry.

Critical mixed methods approaches allow us to reflect upon the ways in which we collect, measure, interpret, and analyze data, providing novel alternatives for quantitative analysis. For institutional researchers, whose work influences institutional policies, programs, and practices, the approach has the transformative ability to expose and create…

Numbers of students of color enrolling in higher educational institutions is expected to increase across all racial groups. With continued increases in minority enrollments, minority-serving institutions have and will continue to play a major role in educating student of color. A large national data set was used to examine the numbers of…

The author discusses the importance of critical quantitative research for studies of immigrant students, a large and growing group, whose higher education experience is crucial to the future of the United States. The author outlines some of the distinctions to be made among immigrant students and recommends areas of future inquiry.

This chapter uses a critical quantitative approach to study models and measures of civic engagement for Latina/o college students. The chapter describes the importance of a critical quantitative approach to study civic engagement of Latina/o college students, then uses Hurtado et al.'s (Hurtado, S., 2012) model to examine the civic engagement…