New Directions for Institutional Research Adding Supplemental Volumes on Assessment

Assessment has quickly become one of the most urgent issues facing higher education.  The need for all education institutions across both K-12 and postsecondary sectors to demonstrate their effectiveness in providing services has its roots in political critiques of education such as A Nation At Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) and more recently the work of the Spellings Commission (Commission on the Future of Higher Education, 2006) and the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.  Findings ways of demonstrating the effectiveness of education has proven to be more elusive, in large part due to the difficulty in measuring education outcomes.  Nonetheless, political pressure has increased on education providers at all levels to convince stakeholders that investments in education are effective.

The pressure on institutions to show that they are accountable to their stakeholders has naturally worked its way to the institutional research (IR) offices at most institutions.  College administrators are turning to their IR offices to help them find ways of responding to these increased calls for accountability.

New Directions for Institutional Research has strived to be a leading source of information on research and practice in institutional research as it pertains to assessment.  The series has included volumes in recent years on assessment-related topics including institutional effectiveness, evaluating faculty performance, reporting, measuring character outcomes of students, and qualitative assessment, to name but a few.  To help highlight this aspect of the series, Jossey-Bass is pleased to announce that New Directions for Institutional Research will publish a fifth supplemental volume for each of the next five years that will focus specifically on assessment.  It is hoped that the Assessment Supplements will help fill an important role in moving the profession towards finding better ways that institutional research offices can assist their campuses in responding to this pressure.  I would also encourage interested readers to review past volumes in the New Directions series for additional work on assessment-related topics.

Robert K. Toutkoushian

Editor-in-Chief

New Directions for Institutional Research

 

References:

Commission on the Future of Higher Education.  A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.  A report Commissioned by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2006.

National Commission on Excellence in Education.  A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.  A Report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education.  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1983.