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Center for Justice & Economic Advancement

Normalizing Education Resource Center

 

Working With Institutional Research 

 

Prepared by Sandra Staklis, RTI International (July 2023) 

Institutions of higher education have offices of institutional research (IR) that oversee the planning, collection, and dissemination of information on students, academic programs, and other aspects of the institution. These offices typically manage the reporting of student and programmatic data required by state or federal government agencies, such as for the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. Some IR offices also provide faculty and staff with information about students and the effectiveness of higher education programs and can help collect and interpret the data needed for federal and other reporting requirements.  

IR offices can assist higher education programs in prisons with accessing and collecting data on their students and programs. IR offices can also help programs meet the data reporting requirements and evaluate program effectiveness, including student outcomes.

What is institutional research? 
According to the Association for Institutional Research, the primary role of IR is to provide objective, systematic, and thorough research that supports the institution’s goals, planning, policy formation, and decision making. Although the scope of IR activities varies by institution, the functions of institutional research can include the following:

  • Identifying information needs

  • Collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and reporting data and information

  • Contributing to operational, budgetary, and strategic planning and program evaluation

  • Serving as stewards of data and information

  • Education, information producers, users, and consumers 

Depending on the institution, IR offices may also coordinate with other offices in the institution engaged in data collection and analysis, such as offices of the registrar, financial aid, and institutional effectiveness.

What support can IR offices provide for higher education in prison programs? 

Through the functions listed, IR offices can help program staff collect, access, and analyze the data needed to start a program, analyze its effectiveness, and analyze student outcomes, depending on office capacity. 

 

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"If the IR office isn’t front and center as it is at my campus, faculty may not know what they do. We start programs knowing that we’re going to be looking at the data. We don’t think of that after the fact. On day one, we ask: How are we going to measure this? How are we going to see if we’re successful? We don’t just get started and figure that out later."

- Collin Witherspoon,
   Executive Director of Institutional Research, Amarillo College

IR offices can help program staff interpret and meet federal regulations that require data on programs and students. For example, the IR office could provide data needed for the initial Pell Grant approval process and for determining whether a program is operating in the best interest of students, such as data on instructor qualifications, credentials, and turnover. 
Accreditation agencies are part of the process for approving programs to administer Pell Grants to incarcerated students. During higher education in prison programs’ initial two-year period of access to Pell Grants, college accreditation agencies evaluate the program and conduct a site visit. At each step, accreditors may request information that IR offices can facilitate access to, such as data on faculty qualifications and workloads, student services, and course and program assessment measures.  
In addition to collecting data on students while enrolled, some IR offices can access data on students’ post-program outcomes even if they do not enroll in your institution after release. For example, IR offices may be able to obtain data on postsecondary enrollment from the National Student Clearinghouse or employment and wage data from state departments of labor. These data can provide insights into student outcomes after they leave your program.  
Although IR office capacity and staff expertise vary, IR can also assist with collecting survey and other data on students and programs and provide ongoing feedback on student and program outcomes through existing analysis tools such as dashboards. Some IR offices also have the capacity to conduct in-depth analysis of data on programs and students that go beyond descriptive statistics. These analyses might include assessing the impact of specific program features on retention and completion or comparing the outcomes of different groups of students over time. 
To effectively support students who are incarcerated, programs often need information on their students from departments of corrections, such as sentence length and time to release. IR offices can help programs establish a process to access these data and provide examples of data sharing agreements and data sharing templates. 

What are effective practices for working with IR? 

IR specialists emphasize the importance of including IR offices in your program planning, particularly if you anticipate needing support with accessing data to meet regulatory or other requirements.