Topic: Student learning and outcomes

“Fostering Data Literacy: Teaching with Quantitative Data in the Social Sciences” explores why and how instructors teach with data, identifies the most important challenges they face, and describes how faculty and students utilize relevant campus and external resources. Full details and actionable recommendations for stakeholders are offered in the body of the report, which offers guidance to university libraries and other campus units, faculty, vendors, and others interested in improving institutional capacities to support data-intensive instruction in the social sciences.

This brief provides a roadmap for stakeholders interested in the underlying practices that create stranded credits and what can be done to improve them. To begin, we provide specific definitions of the terms and practices implicated in the creation of stranded credits. While researchers and policy leaders have increased their attention on the problem of stranded credits, this brief lays out in detail how they are created, why they matter, and what can be done to better balance the interests…

Since the passage of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, the federal government has relied on the accreditation process to ensure quality at postsecondary institutions receiving federal dollars. In the ensuing decades, spending on higher education by the federal government—most significantly through federal student loans and grants—and by individuals has increased exponentially. Even as this spending helped fuel substantial growth in enrollment, a completion crisis has left many former students with debt but no degree, and highly uncertain labor…