Spirituality in Higher Education:  A Research Symposium

Dates:  Sunday, December 6th & Monday, December 7th, 2009

Place:  UCLA Faculty Center

Format:  Sunday, December 6th welcome dinner at 6:30 in the Hacienda  Room

Monday, December 7th 8:30 a.m. -  3:30 p.m. research presentations  and lunch in the Sequoia Room

website:  www.spirituality.ucla.edu

For a full listing of our presentations, including paper titles, authors, date/time of session, click here.

Based on data collected during the 2007-08 administration of the HERI Faculty Survey, the findings of which were published in the American College Teacher (2009), the research discussed in this article is especially timely given the budget constraints that have beset many institutions of higher education during the current economic downturn.

Among the findings discussed in the article, as well as the published report, are that female faculty are less satisfied with their careers than male faculty, and that differences in satisfaction are most acute at the rank of full professor. For example, significantly fewer female than male full professors are satisfied with their opportunity for scholarly pursuits, and their teaching loads. The article suggests that because senior women are more dissatisfied with their careers short-term budget-related changes in teaching and teaching load are likely to affect women more than men. Based on the research discussed in the article, Hurtado & DeAngelo conclude by discussing how deans and department chairs can support senior women and keep them on campus.

Click here to read a complete copy of the published Academe article.

In addition to “how-to” pages in the report, our webcast takes you through the new features and some of the rationale for why the changes were made.

You can view the webcast here.

A sample of our new report can be found here.

Our Institutional and Longitudinal Profiles have always been a popular resource for institutions.  We have expanded the amount of information available in these reports to help you glean more information.  The frequency distributions have been expanded to show all values, instead of partial listings.  You will also find means, results of statistical significance tests, and effect sizes for appropriate scaled survey items. As always with CIRP reports, we compare your institution to comparison groups, with separate results broken out by gender, although now these comparisons will come with added power to determine significant differences.

In addition to the new statistical information, we are also launching three new sets of reports.

CIRP Construct Reports.  The CIRP Constructs represent sets of related survey items that measure an underlying trait or aspect of a student’s life.  We provide one score for that trait. We use Item Response Theory (IRT) to create the constructs, a modern psychometric method that has several advantages over methods used in more traditional factor analysis.  Included in the CIRP Construct Reports are definitions of the CIRP Constructs, weighted scores, means, statistical tests and effect sizes allowing you to compare your institution with comparison groups.  For more information on CIRP Constructs, please click here.

CIRP Theme Reports. The CIRP Theme reports combine relevant items together for easy access.  The themes are more loosely structured than the CIRP Constructs and in some cases include together survey items that just would not be appropriate to combine in a construct.  By examining items together (e.g. Active and Collaborative Learning, Health and Wellness) the theme reports can be used to illustrate what contributes to a specific area of interest and facilitate discussion on campus.

Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) Portrait. The CIRP College Senior Survey (CSS) is one of the assessment instruments chosen to support the Voluntary System of Accountability.  The VSA report organizes CSS results for use in the VSA College Portrait.

We hope that you find these enhanced reports useful in interpreting your CIRP results.  We look forward to your feedback!

Each year on the CIRP Freshman Survey we ask hundreds of thousands of incoming students to tell us the relative importance of various factors when deciding which college to choose. Each year since we added this option to the list (in 1995) the results tell us that “rankings in national magazines” is of relatively little importance compared to other higher “ranked” concerns. In 2008, only 17.6 percent of incoming first-year students reported that these rankings were “very important” in deciding which college to attend. In comparison, 64.7 percent reported that “academic reputation” was very important. Lest one interject that surely academic reputation is based on the rankings, I would counter that students have been telling us this for years before the rankings were a twinkle in the eye of the editors at US News.

In addition to academic reputation, many students choices are impacted by if the school’s graduates get good jobs (54.2 percent), if they were offered financial assistance (43.0 percent), and a visit to campus (41.4 percent). Of the 21 items we currently ask about on the CIRP Freshman Survey, 10 come out as being more important to more students than rankings. (see our monograph “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2008″ for more information. While the importance of rankings has risen since 1995, when only 10.5 percent reported they were “very important,” in recent years the percentage seems to have leveled off in the 16-17 percent range.

It’s evident then that rankings are way down the list in what an incoming student considers when choosing what college or university to call home. Which then begs the question…why the fuss?

To go directly to the webcast click here.

To go directly to the full report on which the webast is based click here.

RSS is short for Real Simple Syndication. You can use RSS to gather news and updates from a website without the need to constantly open a web browser and check the website. RSS takes the legwork out of checking for website updates and allows users to easily manage their flow of news and information.

For information on how to join our RSS feed click here.

The NIH/NSF Research Group had two presentations at AIR.

Thinking and Acting Like Scientists: Investigating the Outcomes of Introductory Science and Math Courses

We Do Science Here: Underrepresented Students in Different College Contexts

The Ford Research group had one presentation at AIR.

The Climate for Diversity: Studying Student Perceptions and Experiences in the First Year of College

And, we also have available to post from AIR our  HERI  “Habits of Mind” study.

Fostering “Habits of Mind” in the First Year of College: Results from a National Study

Click on the title of the presentations above to go straight to presentations slides.

In addition, if you are interested in keeping up with the research of one of our research groups it is a good idea to bookmark the part of the HERI website that is devoted to the research group’s efforts. Follow the links to the pages that you can bookmark.

NIH/NSF Page

Ford Page

Templeton Page

General HERI Research Page

Aaron Pearl, Laura Palucki Blake, and John Pryor