This chapter is a case study of one institution's effort to institutionalize a process through which student development is promoted through active engagement with the community.

This chapter describes the impact of an alternative spring break program on students at the Savannah College of Art and Design over a set of years as well as its effectiveness as a service-learning tool.

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.

The community college environment is complex and dynamic, requiring constant monitoring. To ensure that workforce education, a core component of community colleges' missions, remains aligned with colleges' environments, responsive to employers' needs, suited to students' interests and abilities, and current in content and technology, it is…

As the pressure to win in select collegiate sports escalates, financial pressures mount, and the need to comply with Title IX regulations and gender equity policies continues, athletics administrators are faced with having to make difficult decisions regarding their sport programs. To assist in the decision-making process regarding sport programs,…

Qualitative methods can do much to describe context and illuminate the why behind patterns encountered in institutional assessment. Alone, or in combination with quantitative methods, they should be the approach of choice for many of the most important assessment questions. (Contains 1 table.)

Programs that serve underrepresented minority students have long faced many challenges. Prior to the late 1970s, higher education institutions reserved academic program slots for underrepresented minority students because these students had limited access to opportunities that afforded them credentials that their white counterparts could more…

The purpose of this research is to discuss development of the Logistical Tracking System (LTS)1 and evaluate the changes in processes and procedures at the University of Texas-Dallas (UT-Dallas) that were due to implementation of a new type of technology. The chapter elaborates on the positive and negative aspects of designing and constructing a…

There has been very little previous evaluation research that examines the effects of interventions on persistence.

In spite of substantial investment in retention in Indiana higher education, there have been only a few well-designed studies that evaluate the effects of these interventions.

Evaluation can provide the assessment information for considering program change as well as be integral to the program design and pilot test of any new institutional intervention. (Contains 4 tables.)

A former chancellor outlines how he successfully transformed the culture of his campus to enhance retention and student success.

This chapter offers techniques that can help institutional researchers play a more active role in the process of creating and modifying instructional programs to meet workforce needs. (Contains 1 table.)

Stung by a negative accreditation review, Los Angeles City College established an administrative position and a planning process that is successfully creating a culture of continuous improvement. At the core of this success is a "plan-act-check" reinforcing systems loop that links planning, budgeting, and institutional research. (Contains 2…

Integrated planning promotes collaborative thinking and furnishes mechanisms for linking strategic plans with operational plans. (Contains 1 figure.)