Browsing by Subject "Association for Institutional Research Upper Midwest (AIRUM)"

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12
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    Beyond Retention: Community Service for Leadership and Social Change
    (2011-10) Soria, Krista M.; Nobbe, June; Huesman, Ronald L. Jr.
    This presentation examines the relationship between participation in community service and the development of leadership values among a random sample of 1,107 undergraduates who took the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL) survey at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. The MSL is an annual, national survey of leadership development among college students. It explores the role of higher education in developing leadership capacities with a special focus on specific environmental conditions that foster leadership development. The MSL is developed under the Social Change Model (HERI, 1996), which describes leadership as a purposeful, collaborative, values-driven process. Its central principles—social responsibility and change for the common good—are assessed through eight core values that describe students’ level of self-awareness and ability to work with others. Using the framework of the Social Change Model (HERI, 1996) and Astin’s (1993) Input-Environment-Output model, multiple regression was used to examine the relationship between participation in community service and the eight core values when controlling for demographic factors, precollege participation in activities, and precollege leadership antecedents. This presentation highlights these findings and demonstrates an effective partnership between institutional research and student affairs.
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    Correlations Between Average Faculty Salaries and Institutional Rankings for Top-ranked Institutions
    (2007-10) Goldfine, Leonard S.; Huesman, Ronald L. Jr.; Jones-White, Daniel R.
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    Identifying Factors Related to Student Success: Utilizing Multinomial Logit Regression to Study Graduation in Higher Education
    (2007-10) Huesman, Ronald L. Jr.; Radcliffe, Peter M.; Jones-White, Daniel R.; Kellogg, John P.; Lee, Giljae
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    Library Data and Student Success
    (2012-11-09) Soria, Krista M.; Nackerud, Shane
    This presentation was delivered at the annual Association for Institutional Research Upper Midwest conference. Staff at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Libraries undertook a pilot project to measure how often, and in what ways, students used the Libraries’ various services. Partnering with the University’s Office of Institutional Research, Libraries staff also investigated whether students who use library services tend to be more successful academically or had higher retention. This presentation highlights the results of data collection and analyses.
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    Modeling the Incidence and Timing of Student Attrition: A Survival Analysis Approach to Retention Analysis
    (2006-11) Radcliffe, Peter M.; Huesman, Ronald L. Jr.; Kellogg, John P.
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    Plug and Play: Developing a Flexible Program Assessment Model
    (2010-10) Huesman, Ronald L. Jr.; Radcliffe, Peter M.; Jones-White, Daniel R.
    The presentation will outline a program assessment design for improving the educational and personal experiences of University of Minnesota students. A recent assessment of a scholarship program for at-risk students will be used to illustrate the approach. Donors, alumni relations and academic affairs units are often involved in the development of scholarship programs aimed at improving the success of at-risk students. Often these programs have a financial, programmatic and/or advisory component aimed at improving student success. Collaborations across these units with institutional research and assessment professionals can provide meaningful exchanges of ideas/perspectives and open up unique opportunities for assessing the impact of participation in these programs. Student success is often measured in terms of academic performance, retention and graduation rates. Plugging a general program participation variable into comprehensive regression model of student success provides a baseline for assessing the effectiveness of a program while controlling for the effects of other factors. Used in conjunction with qualitative approaches [i.e., focus groups, surveys] we can broaden our outcomes of interest as needed. Along with developing a standard reporting template, this approach provides a flexible framework for assessing similar programs in a timely, consistent, and responsible manner that serves multiple needs.
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    The Politics of Equity Research
    (2010-10) Goldfine, Leonard S.; Radcliffe, Peter M.
    The neutrality of an IR office can be put to the test when tasked with conducting an equity study. Even the best intentioned and well reasoned study is subject to political considerations that have little to do with the pursuit of truth. From considerations of what variables to include in a regression model to interpretation of results, what it said, how it is said, and from whom a message comes are all as important as any actual statistical results. This session presents a road map to some of the pitfalls an IR office can face when asked to perform an equity study. Resources from the literature as well as anecdotal experience are used to illustrate the often exasperating decisions and negotiations institutional researchers will have to face when moving beyond the realm of pure research and into studies that could have a large and immediate impact on the University and its employees and students lives.
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    Serving to Learn: Does Community Based Learning Participation Contribute to More Desirable Student Outcomes?
    (2010-10) Jones-White, Daniel R.; Soria, Krista M.; Huesman, Ronald L. Jr.
    Given the increasing emphasis on public engagement on many college campuses, it is important to assess the extent to which engagement opportunities provide meaningful and valuable experiences for college students. While there is growing evidence to support the notion that public engagement opportunities (e.g. service-learning, volunteerism) contributes to student academic success, Eyler, Giles, and Gray (1999) caution that there is no consensus on the impact of engagement experiences and academic achievement indicators, such as grade point average. Given the apparent lack of agreement in the research, this study attempts to identify if there is a relationship between participation in community based learning activities and first-year achievement in college. To assess if there is an independent relationship between participating in different communitybased activities and first-year student grade point average, this study utilizes a sample of first-time, full-time freshmen students enrolled at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in Fall 2009 who participated in a unique survey of student engagement (the SERU survey) administered during Spring 2010.
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    Staff Work Satisfaction: An Analysis of the Unexamined Majority in Academia
    (2010-10) Goldfine, Leonard S.; Cha, Min Young
    Higher education is a labor-intensive industry (Johnsrud, 2002; Levin, 1991). As in any other organization, understanding what satisfies its personnel is essential for improving productivity. However, how staff members perceive, respond, and behave to pay, benefit, and other workplace-related issues has not been studied with as much intensity as for faculty groups. Their jobs in academia are becoming increasingly professionalized: important for supporting academic productivity and managing administrative efficiency. Given the classical duality theory by Herzberg (1959) and existing models for administrative job satisfaction (Volkwein & Zhou, 2003), this paper investigates how seniority and job category explain the satisfaction of staff members, as well as with other factors at a large, public, research-intensive institution. The data used are from a biennial system-wide employment satisfaction survey and analyzed using multiple linear regression. Out of 18,719 invitees for the 2010 survey, Instructional Professionals and Administrators and other Staff represent 79% of the survey population.
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    Victims of Our Success: How OIR Survived the Flood of Ad-Hoc Requests for Faculty/Staff Satisfaction Survey Data
    (2011-10) Goldfine, Leonard S.
    In 2009, the University of Minnesota Office of Institutional research, in partnership with a steering team of select faculty and the Of- fice of Communications launched a massive effort to redesign its biennial HR survey, whose results in past years had been largely ignored by Uni- versity policy makers. In addition to a substantial paring down of the sur- vey instrument, the standard University-, Campus- and College-level re- ports were redesigned to provide more and immediate and actionable in- formation. This sparked a greater demand for more detailed drill- downs. To encourage greater use of this wealth of data, OIR developed an Excel-based ad-hoc report generator to quickly provide results for the seemingly infinite variations on the most commonly asked-for types of reports. To date, since its development less than a year ago, OIR has re- leased over 250 reports to administrators at all levels. This presentation is a demonstration of how a combination of project plan- ning and some clever Excel tools allowed us to quickly and easily prepare customized reports for campus clients. Items that will be discussed in- clude our template/design model, our possibility matrix for determining whether or not a request for drill-down data meets minimum privacy standards, and Excel tools such as pivot tables, lookup tables, and macros that saved OIR from being buried by the fruits of its success.
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