Publications
Research Report
November 7, 2019
Aligning Many Campuses and Instructors around a Common Adaptive Learning Courseware in Introductory Statistics
Lessons from a Multi-Year Pilot in Maryland
The Adaptive Learning in Statistics (ALiS) project was a multi-year pilot initiative in which faculty members from multiple two-year and four-year public institutions in Maryland used a common adaptive learning courseware in their introductory statistics courses and received training and instructional resources on an active learning and flipped classroom pedagogical approach. The project was organized and led by Ithaka S+R in collaboration with Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics (TPSE Math), the William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation at the…
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Issue Brief
November 6, 2019
What Do Our Users Need?
An Evidence-Based Approach for Designing New Services
In the face of evolving user needs, many academic libraries are reimagining the services they offer. As instruction moves online, how can libraries best provide support for teaching and learning? As research becomes more reliant on data, computation, and collaboration, where can libraries best add value? As colleges welcome more diverse student populations and greater contingent faculty labor to campus, what is the library’s role? As budgets shrink, how should a library prioritize which resources and services to provide?…
Research Report
October 24, 2019
Surveying Community College Students
Strategies for Maximizing Engagement and Increasing Participation
Higher education researchers need to employ effective outreach methods in order to connect with the populations they study. For surveys in particular, low response rates can lead to non-response error, decreasing generalizability and representativeness. To combat these issues, Ithaka S+R has developed and tested a suite of outreach strategies that we have employed over the past two decades in our long-running national faculty survey as well as our local surveys of faculty and students.[1] In fall 2018, we surveyed students…
Playbook
October 17, 2019
Unlocking the Power of Collaboration
How to Develop a Successful Collaborative Network in and around Higher Education
Recognizing that solutions to today’s complex problems go beyond the boundaries of a single organization or institution, some postsecondary education leaders and training providers are turning to a more focused and deeper level of collaboration to drive both individual and broader systemic change with potential for far-reaching social impact.
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Issue Brief
October 2, 2019
The Strategic Alignment of State Appropriations, Tuition, and Financial Aid Policies
In response to the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, states reduced their expenditures on many public services and goods, including substantial cuts to higher education spending. Despite a strong economic recovery since the Great Recession and significant increases in student enrollment, most states’ spending on higher education has not returned to pre-recession levels. Reductions in state spending and rising costs have led a number of public colleges and universities to increase tuition, making college less affordable for many students…
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Research Report
September 30, 2019
Student Needs Are Academic Needs
Community College Libraries and Academic Support for Student Success
The Community College Libraries and Academic Support for Student Success (CCLASSS) project examines student success from the perspective of students themselves, what challenges they face in achieving it, and what services can be developed to effectively support them in their attainment of that success. In fall 2018, we surveyed 10,844 students across seven community colleges to assess the value of and demand for proposed services designed to address students’ expressed goals, challenges, and needs.
Research Report
July 10, 2019
Organizing the Work of the Art Museum
The career trajectory of art museum directors typically gives them deep exposure to, at most, a handful of institutional settings. While museum directors connect through leadership meetings such as those we host at the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), and thereby learn from one another, few have the opportunity to assemble a system-wide perspective on how changes in strategy might, or perhaps should, affect their institutional leadership. Given the strategic transformations that many art museums are undertaking or considering,…
Research Report
June 27, 2019
Technical Supplement – Interim Findings Report: MAAPS Advising Experiment
Overview Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS) is a multi-institutional project of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA), supported by a U.S. Department of Education First in the World Grant to Georgia State University, the lead UIA member on this project. MAAPS is a large-scale randomized-controlled trial designed to validate the effectiveness of technology-enhanced proactive advisement in increasing retention, progression, and achievement for low-income and first-generation college students. Addressing documented obstacles to college completion that disproportionately impact at-risk populations,…
Research Report
June 27, 2019
Interim Findings Report: MAAPS Advising Experiment
Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS) is a multi-institutional project of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA), supported by a U.S. Department of Education First in the World Grant to Georgia State University, a UIA member. The large-scale, randomized-controlled trial was designed to test and validate the effectiveness of technology-enhanced, proactive advisement in increasing retention, progression, and achievement for incoming low-income and first-generation college students. The MAAPS intervention was officially launched during the Fall 2016 term at the 11 institutions…
Issue Brief
June 12, 2019
Setting a North Star
Motivations, Implications, and Approaches to State Postsecondary Attainment Goals
Higher education attainment goals can serve as a “north star” to guide states’ postsecondary policies, investments, and agendas. The extent to which state attainment goals lead to substantive improvements in college-going rates, college graduation rates, postsecondary credential attainment rates, and reductions in labor market skills gaps is as yet unclear. Further, the likelihood a state will meet its attainment goals varies by state and depends on contextual factors that are within and outside the purview of the education sector. In…
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Issue Brief
June 6, 2019
What’s a Collection Anyway?
In 1953, Kenneth J. Braugh stated that the mission of Harvard’s library was to collect and preserve everything. Those days are long gone. For the last couple of decades, given the rapid expansion of scholarly content sources and types, even the best-funded research libraries have become cognizant that a comprehensive collection is an unattainable vision. Nevertheless, many research library mission statements continue to give prominence to their role in making the world’s knowledge accessible to a wide range of user…
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Research Report
May 30, 2019
Unbarring Access
A Landscape Review of Postsecondary Education in Prison and Its Pedagogical Supports
Postsecondary education in US prisons is a growing topic in both academic and political circles. While much of the discourse surrounding higher education more broadly focuses on students’ educational and employment outcomes, the conversation around postsecondary education in prisons often centers on the societal benefits of this programming, with a strong focus on reduced recidivism rates – the rates with which formerly incarcerated individuals engage in criminal acts that result in their re-arrest, re-conviction, or re-incarceration. With 1.5 million people…
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Research Report
May 15, 2019
Better Than We Thought
Comparing Publicly Available Data on College Students’ Income Distribution
In January 2017, a valuable new information source was introduced to the higher education community. Researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project—now called Opportunity Insights—released detailed data on the financial circumstances of undergraduate students at each of the vast majority of American colleges and universities.[1] Covering students born between 1980 and 1991, and relying on tax records held by the Internal Revenue Service, the publicly available Opportunity Insights data provided a nuanced look at the family income distribution as well…
Issue Brief
May 13, 2019
Data Communities
A New Model for Supporting STEM Data Sharing
As organizations and initiatives designed to promote STEM data sharing multiply – within, across, and outside academic institutions – there is a pressing need to decide strategically on the best ways to move forward. Central to this decision is the issue of scale. Is data sharing best assessed and supported on an international or national scale? By broad academic sector (engineering, biomedical)? By discipline? On a university-by-university basis? Or using another unit of analysis altogether? To the extent that there…
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Research Report
April 12, 2019
Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2018
The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members on a triennial basis since 2000. Our aim in this project is to provide actionable findings and analysis to help colleges and universities as well as relevant support services, such as academic libraries, learned societies, and scholarly publishers, plan for the future.
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Research Report
April 11, 2019
When Research is Relational
Supporting the Research Practices of Indigenous Studies Scholars
Danielle Miriam Cooper, Tanya Ball, Michelle Nicole Boyer-Kelly, Anne Carr-Wiggin, Carrie Cornelius, J. Wendel Cox, Sarah Dupont, Cody Fullerton, MaryLynn Gagné, Scott Garton, Ridie Wilson Ghezzi, Michelle Guittar, Kawena Komeiji, Sheila Laroque, Kayla Lar-Son, Kim Lawson, Deborah Lee, Janice Linton, Julia Logan, Keahiahi Long, Lorisia MacLeod, Shavonn Matsuda, Sara E. Morris, Lisa O'Hara, Rebecca Orozco, Annemarie Paikai, Michael Peper, Michael Perry, Gina Petersen, Verónica Reyes-Escudero, Anthony Sanchez, Kapena Shim, David Smith, Jennifer Sylvester, Jennifer Toews, Niamh Wallace, Amy Witzel, Desmond Wong
In 2017 Ithaka S+R launched a project to explore the changing research methods and practices of Indigenous Studies scholars across Canada and the US with the goal of identifying services to better support them in ways that are also beneficial to Indigenous communities more broadly. The project was undertaken by a cohort of research teams at 11 academic libraries with guidance from a group of advisors comprised of Indigenous scholars and librarians. Each research team in the cohort developed findings…
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Issue Brief
April 9, 2019
Challenges to Higher Education’s Most Essential Purposes
In his 2000 Romanes Lecture, entitled “At a Slight Angle to the Universe, the University in a Digitized, Commercialized Age,” William Bowen anticipated many of the challenges higher education faces today. His incisive summary of the most important purposes of higher education offers a useful framework for assessing how higher education is fulfilling its uniquely important role supporting a vibrant democratic society. Those responsible for higher education’s well-being, including presidents, administrators, trustees, faculty, and government policy makers, would do well…
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Issue Brief
April 9, 2019
Technology, Georgia Tech, and the Future of Learning
An Interview with Charles Isbell
I invited Charles Isbell, Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech to join me at the October 2018 Bowen Colloquium, a forward-looking gathering of college and university presidents and other leaders. In addition to his work in Artificial Intelligence, Professor Isbell is the Associate Dean in the College of Computing responsible for overseeing Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS). Our conversation covered a wide area, from the unsustainable costs of traditional modes of instruction to his…
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Issue Brief
April 4, 2019
The Market, the American Dream, or Dreams of the Lottery
The Robert H. Atwell Plenary Address, ACE 2019
This paper was originally presented on March 10, 2019, as the Robert H. Atwell Plenary Address at ACE 2019 in Philadelphia. The income disparity in our country has been growing for 40 years, and this increasing inequality is putting pressure on the social cohesion of our nation. Commitment to our country’s institutions, including colleges and universities, and values, including equal opportunity and economic and social mobility, depends on everyone feeling that these institutions and values serve their welfare and their…
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Issue Brief
March 6, 2019
Restructuring Library Collaboration
Strategy, Membership, Governance
Academic libraries typically serve individual higher education institutions, yet their objectives require that they achieve greater negotiating power, more efficient distribution of collections, and stronger systems and services than even the largest academic library can provide itself. As a result, academic libraries have sought for more than a century to generate cross-institutional scale. In this paper, I examine efforts to generate that scale, including consortia and other membership organizations, which collectively I term “collaborative vehicles.” Yet collaboration is not good…
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