Topic: Student learning and outcomes
Blog Post
February 13, 2020
New Report and Forecasting Tool Shows States’ Progress towards Postsecondary Attainment Goals
A postsecondary credential has become a crucial qualification for individuals to pursue a meaningful career with a livable wage. As technology continues to reshape the nature of work, the core competencies gained through postsecondary education and strategic up-skilling by adult workers will be ever more important. States have a critical role to play in supporting their residents’ education and training, and a vested interest in seeing educational attainment increase. Recognizing this, and driven by initiatives of the Lumina Foundation and…
Research Report
February 13, 2020
Raising the Bar
What States Need to Do to Hit Their Ambitious Higher Education Attainment Goals
Over the past decade, there has been considerable attention placed on the role that state higher education systems play in preparing residents for a rapidly changing labor market. Given the increasing importance of a postsecondary degree in this market—both due to disproportionate growth in high skilled jobs and an influx of credentialization—educational attainment has become a focal point in discussions amongst researchers, policy advocates, and institutional actors. The attainment rate, calculated as the share of adults possessing a postsecondary credential,…
Blog Post
February 12, 2020
Now Available: Research Toolkit for Developing Services and Assessing Student Needs
Over the past three years, we partnered with a group of seven colleges looking to more effectively support their students by providing new and strengthened services from the library and beyond. Across these colleges, we interviewed dozens of students and later surveyed over 10,000 to examine their goals, challenges, and unmet needs. The project was led by Northern Virginia Community College and Ithaka S+R, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)…
Blog Post
February 11, 2020
The Case for Academic Libraries and “College Fluency”
Students struggle with a variety of challenges outside of the classroom that affect their academic success–balancing family, household, work, and school responsibilities, having enough money to pay for courses and basic needs, and navigating college resources and services. When presented via survey with a series of possible interventions to address these needs, students expressed great interest in having more support in navigating information related to the college experience, as described in this service…
Past Event
April 21, 2020
Examining the Effects of Performance-Based Funding on Efficiency of Degree Production
James Dean Ward at the AERA Annual Conference
The AERA is moving to a virtual conference. When we have details we will update this event. On Tuesday, April 21, James Dean Ward will be presenting on “Examining the Effects of Performance-Based Funding on Efficiency of Degree Production” at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Conference in San Francisco. His talk is part of a session on “The Carrots, Sticks, and Unintended Consequences of State Higher Education Policy,” taking place at 12:25. The session is being held in…
Blog Post
February 4, 2020
Student Success: One Goal, Many Definitions
While many colleges see enabling “student success” as a top priority, what actually defines the term can vary widely depending on who is defining it. As such, it is hard—perhaps impossible—to have a single, quantifiable, and operational definition. In this post, I unpack how a few key stakeholders—community college students and administrators—have conceptualized this seemingly loaded term in our research along with questions for further reflection as we embark on a new project. Over the past…
Case Study
January 23, 2020
Internship Program Evaluation
Brooklyn Museum and Citi Foundation
Citigroup and the Citi Foundation have supported two years of paid internships through the Brooklyn Museum’s education department. The $125,000 grant is part of the foundation’s “Pathways to Progress” initiative. In 2017, Citi Foundation committed $100 million to this global effort to support pathways into careers for emerging professionals. The funding allowed the Brooklyn Museum to hire twenty interns, ten for the summer of 2018 and ten for the summer of 2019. The goal for this funding was to provide…
Past Event
February 10, 2020
Improving College Opportunity for Veterans and Service Members
Hosted by Ithaka S+R and College Board
On February 10-11, Ithaka S+R and the College Board are hosting a convening on Improving College Opportunity for Veterans and Service Members at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. The goals of this convening are to build and leverage community amongst organizations focused on improving opportunities for veteran students; share knowledge on effective practices that can improve recruitment, support, graduation, and opportunities for veteran students; and support and sustain commitments The convening will open on February 10 with keynote remarks from…
Past Event
January 27, 2020
Martin Kurzweil at the Non-Degree Credentials Research Network Meeting
On Monday, January 27, Martin Kurzweil be presenting at the Non-Degree Credentials Research Network Meeting at George Washington University in Washington DC. For more information, please see the NCRN website. …
Past Event
January 30, 2020
Catharine Bond Hill and Martin Kurzweil at the Mellon Research Forum Convening
Catharine Bond Hill and Martin Kurzweil will be participating the Mellon Research Forum Convening hosted by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in Irvine, California on January 30-31. They will be discussing their continuing research on the value of a liberal arts education. For more information on the forum, please see the Foundation website. …
Past Event
March 12, 2020
The Data Disconnect
Kurtis Tanaka at the 2020 RDAP Summit
On Thursday, March 12, Kurtis Tanaka is presenting on “The Data Disconnect: How Changing Industry Data Sharing Policies Impact Business Research and Pedagogy” at the Research Data Access & Preservation Association’s 2020 Summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the presentation Business represents the most popular undergraduate major in the United States and is a field that heavily relies on data for both research and instruction. This reliance…
Past Event
July 6, 2020
Catharine Bond Hill at Transforming Teaching and Learning
An Inside Higher Ed Event
Catharine Bond Hill is speaking at Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching and Learning event in Minneapolis from July 6-8. To learn more and to register, please see the conference website. About the event Higher education is easily–and unfairly–caricatured as having changed little for 200 years. Experimentation is abundant in college and university classrooms, physical and otherwise. But as pressure builds to ensure that more people develop the education and skills that employers (and society) need, colleges and their…
Past Event
March 3, 2020
Shaping Up Services: Developing Prototypes for Student Success
Melissa Blankstein at the Educause ELI Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, March 3, Melissa Blankstein is presenting a poster on “Shaping Up Services: Developing Prototypes for Student Success,” at the Educause ELI Annual Meeting in Bellevue, Washington. For more information and to register, please visit the conference website. About the poster What methodologies can higher education institutions employ to develop new services that promote student success? This poster will share a data-driven approach recently implemented across a cohort of colleges: concept testing. Through concept testing, service providers can…
Past Event
February 20, 2020
Student Success Information Interventions: Helping Students Navigate College Services and Resources
Christine Wolff-Eisenberg at DREAM 2020
On Thursday, February 20, Christine Wolff-Eisenberg will be presenting on a panel, “Student Success Information Interventions: Helping Students Navigate College Services and Resources,” at DREAM 2020 in National Harbor, Maryland. Christine will be joined on the panel by Jean Amaral (Borough of Manhattan Community College), Christie Flynn (Pierce College), and Elizabeth Jardine (LaGuardia Community College). For more information and to register, please visit the conference website. About the panel Research recently conducted across seven community colleges has demonstrated the…
Blog Post
January 8, 2020
Quiet Spaces, Kids On Campus, and Academic Libraries
College students often crave quiet space for completing their coursework. Many have complex lives with various professional, personal, and academic demands — long commutes, multiple jobs, roommates, children, etc. The campus library is a place — and sometimes the only place — they can go for quiet, distraction-free space. It can be their respite from an otherwise noisy set of activities. Over the weekend,…
Blog Post
December 18, 2019
How Do Test-Optional or Test-Flexible Policies Affect Access and Opportunity?
A growing number of institutions have adopted or are considering test-optional or -flexible policies in recent years. Most recently, leaders of the University of California and several of its campuses have publicly discussed removing standardized test scores as an application requirement due to the perception that standardized tests are inherently biased against underserved students. Such a large system of selective institutions moving away from standardized tests would represent a dramatic shift in the higher education ecosystem. Although the number…
Blog Post
December 17, 2019
Reflecting on the Lessons from a Technology Implementation Study in Maryland
Interviews on the ALiS Project
Ithaka S+R recently co-led the Adaptive Learning in Statistics (ALiS) study, a multi-year and multi-campus pilot initiative, which aimed to test whether changing the way introductory statistics is taught in college classrooms–by using adaptive learning technology and active learning pedagogy–would significantly improve course-level learning outcomes for students across a diverse set of two-year and four-year institutions in Maryland. In the interviews linked below, several participants in the ALiS study share their reflections on the project lessons from multiple perspectives,…
Blog Post
December 12, 2019
Teaching Business: New Report Explores the Needs of Business Faculty
Today Ithaka S+R is releasing the first report in a new program focused on supporting teaching practices. In it, we explore the needs of faculty teaching undergraduate business. We started with business as it is consistently one of the most popular majors in the United States, and understanding the needs of faculty in this field can have a large impact on undergraduate teaching and learning. Informed by interviews with 158 business…
Blog Post
December 12, 2019
An Interview with Dr. Alexandra W. Logue
Expanding Pathways to College Enrollment and Degree Attainment
Dr. Alexandra W. Logue is a Research Professor in CASE (the Center for Advanced Study in Education) of the Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY), with particular responsibility for research and scholarship concerning college student success. Dr. Logue is a leading expert on remediation and transfer, and her most recent book, Pathways to Reform: Credits and Conflict at The City University of New York (Princeton University Press), is a case study regarding the difficulty of making…
Research Report
December 12, 2019
Teaching Business
Looking at the Support Needs of Instructors
Business represents the most popular undergraduate major at American colleges and universities and was seen as the ideal discipline to begin with, especially as the potential number of students to be positively impacted is correspondingly large. The goal of this report, therefore, is to provide actionable findings for organizations, institutions, and professionals who support the teaching practices of business educators. This report describes the teaching practices of business instructors, both those that are common to all college level instruction as…