About

How can we measure how well we live our mission?

Institutional research is the work of using quantitative and qualitative data to describe and analyze school processes. Institutional research projects help a school assess how well they are attaining their mission and provide insights for ways to improve. Common areas of institutional research include:

• Enrollment Management and Marketing

• Tracking the impact of curricular changes and academic outcomes

• Developing metrics to measure Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in a school community

• Financial modeling and budgeting

• Measuring student growth in non-academic areas like wellness, the arts, or athletics

• Establishing ongoing feedback loops for all constituencies including faculty, parents/guardians, students, and alumni

• Supporting hiring and faculty professional development

Core Competencies

Institutional Knowledge

Excellent institutional researchers understand the school’s mission and culture. They are familiar with both formal decision making processes and the informal relational topography of the school. They understand how the various functional elements of the school work together, and they are familiar with different constituencies in the school community.

Data Architecture

Excellent institutional researchers require knowledge of how and where data is stored at a school. Researchers need to know what information the school already has, how to most efficiently build and manage new databases, and how to unite data from multiple sources to construct usable data sets. They should understand a school's data governance practices, how databases are structured, and how to execute queries of those databases.

Data Analysis

Excellent institutional researchers need a strong background in statistics and quantitative analysis. They should be fluent in concepts like sampling and survey design, hypothesis testing, linear and non-linear regression analysis, machine learning algorithms, and the difference between correlation and causation.

Communication

Excellent institutional researchers create graphs, tables, and other data visualizations and explanations that make their work clear and understandable to a wide variety of audiences. Additionally, they are keenly aware of and proactively address the emotional impact and/or skepticism project results can elicit in a school community.

Data Culture

Excellent institutional research is both the catalyst and product of a healthy data culture in a school. In a thriving data culture, faculty and staff grow their individual level of data literacy, they trust each other enough to invite unbiased assessment of their work, and they are secure enough to accept feedback about what is or is not working as believed within the community. In a healthy data culture, institutional research projects have an observable impact on systems and decision-making in the school. Institutions with a healthy data culture have the collective will to change and evolve.

https://ciris.maret.org/about-institutional-research/what-is-institutional-research