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…

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

This chapter centers on the challenges of translating glass ceiling research findings into meaningful organizational change initiatives, moving from theory or scholarship to practice.

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 offers a critical lens for examining intervention efficacy. It highlights a conceptual framework particularly relevant for understanding the experiences of underrepresented students and illustrates how such framing can explicate the mechanisms that impede or enhance successful intervention outcomes in STEM fields.

Item Response Theory (IRT) is a measurement theory that is ideal for scale and test development in institutional research, but it is not without its drawbacks. This chapter provides an overview of IRT, describes an example of its use, and highlights the pros and cons of using IRT in applied settings.

The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to one of the most rigorous nonexperimental analytical methods currently employed by education researchers: regression discontinuity.

This chapter describes the impact that participation in the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement had on the institutions of higher learning that applied for the classification. This is described in terms of changes in direct community engagement, monitoring and reporting on community engagement, and levels of student and professor…

This chapter describes how data on the extent of community service among a national representative sample of young college students were associated with "supports," including human, social, and cultural capital. This chapter helps fill missing information on estimates of the occurrence and persistence of community service, types of…

This chapter describes how canonical correlation was used in conjunction with an item response theory model to address the relationship between college students' civic engagement involvement and attitudes as undergraduates. The constructs of interest were students' participation in civic, political, and expressive activities, as well as…

Faculty and staff at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) have developed several tools to assess campus civic engagement initiatives. This chapter describes the IUPUI Faculty Survey and the Civic-Minded Graduate Scale, and reports on findings from campus-based assessment and research.

Efforts to develop common higher education data standards are expanding both within and across countries. The institutional research (IR) community plays a critical role in assuring that these efforts capture the diverse manifestations of the postsecondary and tertiary education systems and promote responsible comparisons. This chapter provides…