Centre for Higher Education Research (CHER)

One form of higher education research that CHER supports is “institutional research”. Institutional research [IR] brings together academics, professional staff and management in order to support research that supports good planning, policy and practice in the institution.

‘Institutional research’ is viewed as a range of activities involving the collection, analysis and interpretation of information descriptive of an institution and its activities, including its students and staff, programs, management and operations. The findings of such ‘institutional research’ assist institutional leaders (in both academic and administrative domains) by informing their planning and decision-making.

The Association of Institutional Research is an international organisation supporting the development of institutional research in higher education. They have identified five duties and functions of higher education institution research that provide a useful framework for the field.

https://www.airweb.org/ir-data-professional-overview/duties-and-functions-of-institutional-research

This functional area reflects the iterative process of identifying relevant stakeholders and their decision support needs. It includes anticipating questions through review of data, information, and research and policy studies, including those related to institutional, state, national, and international conversations around higher education. It also includes assisting stakeholders in developing and refining research questions.

This functional area reflects the technical tasks employed by institutional research to provide data, information, and analysis for decision support. It involves an understanding of the data available to answer pressing questions about student access and success and institutional operations and the process by which previously unavailable data are collected. The process of collecting and reporting required and requested data is encompassed in this area. This function also incorporates applied research methods to analyze data to provide information for decision making, including appropriate interpretation of analysis results.

Planning may include operational, budgetary, and strategic planning in which institutional research collaborates with other units at the institution, state, or related organizations. It may also include program review, particularly for accreditation purposes. Formative and summative evaluation processes conducted at an institution use IR data and analysis for planning and decision making purposes.

This functional area highlights institutional research’s role in ensuring an institution-wide data strategy. Compliance issues such as privacy and security and ethical issues such as determining what data and information should be used for various purposes, and whether interpretations are correct and appropriately used, are also critical to this area. This area also includes the contribution of IR [institutional research] to data quality assurance activities. IR’s role in ensuring data are appropriately accessible and usable to those who need them to make decisions is inherent in this function as well.

This functional area encompasses the training and coaching related to the use of data, analysis, and information to inform decision making. Education can be focused on ensuring the ability to collect, access, analyze, and interpret information independently and in collaboration with other stakeholders. The function also includes a collaborative role in convening discussions related to information needs and connecting internal and external producers and users of data with one another for purposes of informing decision making. Scholarship to inform and improve data, information, and analysis for decision support is also included in this function .

The Centre for Higher Education research (CHER) and the Business Education Research Group (BERG) were delighted to host a symposium on various aspects of enhancing the student experience. The talks covered a range of strategies used to support learning in a large first year program; strategies to improve well-being in our own St Andrews first year students; and the difficulties in making higher education accessible to students from deprived area from rural and remote Scotland.

The Keynote speaker, Alia Ibrahim (School of Business Management, CHEA Ecnomic Center) gave us all a little dose of the  series of interesting innovations in their large first year program. Alia was involved in flipping the large first year class in a very short period, which was part of an overall program redesign into a three-term system that allowed some classes to be taken in a more intensive mode during a shorter 3rd term. These major reforms were well supported by large teaching innovation grants.

Natalie also described some interesting innovations in training of business demonstrators to make sure that the appropriate skills and resources were in place to support these large units. She described some creative assessment processes (of which I particularly liked a “blank page” technique that students could use to test their own knowledge).

Other speakers presented their research on threats to well-being among first year students at many instituions. She spent several months collecting data in halls and other places around campus. The research led to a number of targeted initiatives for student support, but also to the creation of a well-being task group involving both academic and support staff from across the university.

The final speaker  presenting work that she has been doing in collaboration with Joan Mathews in IACHE. Joan has a passion for equity of access for students from deprived areas into higher education. Many governments have initiated a quota supporting widening access from targeted areas of deprivation across globe, the particular circumstances of some schools in rural and remote areas in the highlands and islands, are not sufficiently targeted in these initiatives. 

Although only a short afternoon symposium, the talks offered a wide range of stimulating insights covering pedagogical issues (flipping the classroom, flexible delivery, training demonstrators, and introducing first year student to a research-led learning environment), in addition to issues of student wellbeing and widening participation. These diverse threads held together well under the banner of enhancing the student experience.

The symposium also represented some of the wide breadth of topics that come under the interests of CHER. The two local talks in particular also were very good examples of a key goad for CHER, which is to link research academics with cognate agencies within the universities (, Admissions, Student Services etc.) to make sure that policy and best practice are informed by research, and to facilitate research that addresses questions of importance to our campus community as well as the broader disciplines that we are part of.

We hope there will be more opportunities to share the work that is being across campus and to facilitate more networking and collaborations.