Books in the J-B IR Single Issue Institutional Research series

Take a broad, balanced look at the present and potential MOOC landscape in higher education. This special volume highlights current trends and issues related to the emergence and development of a new instructional form in higher education: Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

American community colleges represent a true success story. With their multiple missions, they have provided access and opportunity to millions of students. But community colleges are held accountable for their services and must be able to show that they are indeed serving their variety of students appropriately.

While the term benchmarking is commonplace nowadays in institutional research and higher education, less common, is a solid understanding of what it really means and how it has been, and can be, used effectively.

Faculty diversity is gaining unprecedented emphasis in the mission of colleges and universities, and institutional researchers are being pushed for relevant data. This volume examines faculty diversity from a variety of perspectives.

Multilevel modeling is an increasingly popular multivariate technique that is widely applied in the social sciences. Increasingly, practitioners are making instructional decisions based on results from their multivariate analyses, which often come from nested data that lend themselves to multilevel modeling techniques.

Underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields is a problem that has persisted over the past three decades and is most severe at the highest levels of the STEM career path.

Facing a new round of criticisms on the quality of undergraduate education in American colleges and universities, higher education administrators are eager to find or create effective programs and practices that can enrich student experiences and enhance outcomes.

In a global economy, higher education increasingly is being asked to address workforce development needs. This is a relatively new agenda for institutional research, but one that can play directly to the skills that many institutional researchers possess and those that can be quickly developed.

This volume offers institutional researchers several examples of the ways in which quantitative and qualitative methods can be integrated for a better grasp of how members of our educational communities understand and experience their environments on the basis of their multiple identities.

This volume challenges quantitative researchers to become more critical. By providing examples from the work of several prominent researchers, and by offering concrete recommendations, the editor and authors deliver messages that are likely to cause many educational researchers to reexamine their own work.

This volume provides an overview of the many ways that economic concepts, models, and methods have been, and can be, applied to higher education problems encountered in institutional research.

New technologies have revolutionized survey research processes and how researchers and institutions of higher education college gain information from subjects. At the same time, it seems that increasing demands for accountability are forcing colleges and universities to conduct more high-quality surveys to gauge institutional effectiveness.

All around the world, postsecondary institutions are facing competitive environments, declining resources, and changing societal needs. Institutions are affected by globalization, state and local government needs, economic restructuring, information technology, and student and staff mobility.

This volume of New Directions for Institutional Research proposes and tests new approaches to institutional research (IR) that attempt to break down barriers to academic success, particularly focusing on minority students, working students, and others in nontraditional circumstances.