What can an institutional research leader do to ensure their unique roles do not place them or their institution in a legally challenging situation? In this monograph, IR practitioners, legal counselors, and scholars combine their expertise to examine unique legal challenges IR professionals face, offering guidelines for operating within legal boundaries and sustaining effective IR practices. Topics covered in this volume include: using legal precedents and law as a framework for guiding practice and policies; the latest on FERPA; dealing with security breaches; a review of employment, discrimination, harassment, intellectual property, and export control laws; recommendations for limiting liability; and how accreditation may change from voluntary to a contractual or even constitutional protections effort. This is the 172nd volume of this Jossey-Bass quarterly report series. Timely and comprehensive, New Directions for Institutional Research provides planners and administrators in all types of academic institutions with guidelines in such areas as resource coordination, information analysis, program evaluation, and institutional management.

Institutional research is more relevant today than ever before as growing pressures for improved student learning and increased institutional accountability motivate higher education to effectively use ever-expanding data and information resources. As the most current and comprehensive volume on the topic, the Handbook describes the fundamental knowledge, techniques, and strategies that define institutional research. The book contains an overview of the profession and its history, examines how institutional research supports executive and academic leadership and governance, and discusses the varied ways data from federal, state, and campus sources are used by research professionals. With contributions from leading experts in the field, this important resource reviews the analytic tools, techniques, and methodologies used by institutional researchers in their professional practice and covers a wide range of topics such as: conducting institutional research; statistical applications; comparative analyses; quality control systems; measuring student, faculty, and staff opinions; and management activities designed to improve organizational effectiveness.

A source of fresh insights into the status of racial minorities in STEM and the drivers determining minority student success This volume in the acclaimed New Directions for Institutional Success provides answers to some of the most pressing questions regarding racial and ethnic minorities in STEM education. Featuring contributions from educators representing the gamut of institutions of higher learning, from large research universities to community colleges, it delves into the latest research into the factors determining racial minority student success in STEM education. And it provides important practical insights into student underperformance and racial disparities in STEM as well as the drivers of minority student success in STEM.

This Handbook intends to inform Data Providers and researchers on how to provide privacy-protected access to, handle, and analyze administrative data, and to link them with existing resources, such as a database of data use agreements (DUA) and templates. Available publicly, the Handbook will provide guidance on data access requirements and procedures, data privacy, data security, property rights, regulations for public data use, data architecture, data use and storage, cost structure and recovery, ethics and privacy-protection, making data accessible for research, and dissemination for restricted access use. The knowledge base will serve as a resource for all researchers looking to work with administrative data and for Data Providers looking to make such data available.

Improving Access to and Confidentiality of Research Data summarizes a workshop convened by the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) to promote discussion about methods for advancing the often conflicting goals of exploiting the research potential of microdata and maintaining acceptable levels of confidentiality. This report outlines essential themes of the access versus confidentiality debate that emerged during the workshop. Among these themes are the tradeoffs and tensions between the needs of researchers and other data users on the one hand and confidentiality requirements on the other; the relative advantages and costs of data perturbation techniques (applied to facilitate public release) versus restricted access as tools for improving security; and the need to quantify disclosure risksâ€"both absolute and relativeâ€"created by researchers and research data, as well as by other data users and other types of data.

A valuable source of clear, simple guidance on how to assess general education student learning outcomes Based on an exhaustive review of the scholarship, as well as the input of numerous academics at learning institutions around the country, this volume in the acclaimed New Directions for Institutional Research series provides faculty members and assessment teams with the tools they need to assess general education student learning outcomes While Part 1 provides a broad overview of the subject, Part 2 delves into the six key general education learning outcomes, namely, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, intercultural competence, teamwork, civic knowledge and engagement, and integrative and applied learning.

Campus climate studies and research on the impact of diversity in higher education abound. On closer examination, however, the corpus of findings on the role of diversity and how diversity is captured with campus climate surveys reveals both conceptual and methodological limitations. This volume of New Directions for Institutional Research addresses these limitations with the inclusion of studies by institutional research (IR) practitioners who make use of data that furnish new insights into the relationships among student diversity, student perception of campus climate, and student sociodemographic backgroundand how those relationships affect academic outcomes. Each chapter emphasizes how IR practitioners benefit from the conceptual and analytical approach laid out, and each chapter provides a framework to gauge the contribution of diversity to educational benefits. The findings revealed in this volume cast doubt on the benefits of student diversity purported in previous research. At a minimum, the influence of student diversity is neither linear nor unidirectional, but operates within a complex web of interrelated factors that shape the student experience. This is the 145th volume of New Directions for Institutional Research. Always timely and comprehensive, New Directions for Institutional Research provides planners and administrators in all types of academic institutions with guidelines in such areas as resource coordination, information analysis, program evaluation, and institutional management.

Massive amounts of data on human beings can now be analyzed. Pragmatic purposes abound, including selling goods and services, winning political campaigns, and identifying possible terrorists. Yet 'big data' can also be harnessed to serve the public good: scientists can use big data to do research that improves the lives of human beings, improves government services, and reduces taxpayer costs. In order to achieve this goal, researchers must have access to this data - raising important privacy questions. What are the ethical and legal requirements? What are the rules of engagement? What are the best ways to provide access while also protecting confidentiality? Are there reasonable mechanisms to compensate citizens for privacy loss? The goal of this book is to answer some of these questions. The book's authors paint an intellectual landscape that includes legal, economic, and statistical frameworks. The authors also identify new practical approaches that simultaneously maximize the utility of data access while minimizing information risk.

The empirical study of law, legal systems and legal institutions is widely viewed as one of the most exciting and important intellectual developments in the modern history of legal research. Motivated by a conviction that legal phenomena can and should be understood not only in normative terms but also as social practices of political, economic and ethical significance, empirical legal researchers have used quantitative and qualitative methods to illuminate many aspects of law's meaning, operation and impact. In the 43 chapters of The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research leading scholars provide accessible and original discussions of the history, aims and methods of empirical research about law, as well as its achievements and potential. The Handbook has three parts. The first deals with the development and institutional context of empirical legal research. The second - and largest - part consists of critical accounts of empirical research on many aspects of the legal world - on criminal law, civil law, public law, regulatory law and international law; on lawyers, judicial institutions, legal procedures and evidence; and on legal pluralism and the public understanding of law. The third part introduces readers to the methods of empirical research, and its place in the law school curriculum.