Building an Assessment Infrastructure for the Department of Residential Life at IU-Bloomington

As part of my graduate assistantship, I am working closely with my supervisor to create an assessment infrastructure to support the needs of a large residential life unit, with approximately 70 professional and graduate staff, and over 300 student staff. Specifically, this initiative seeks to support IU-Bloomington’s implementation of a residential curriculum model, currently in its third year of existence. After setting the foundation for this initiative during the current academic year, this project will be rolled out to the entire department in 2019-2020.

Statistical Competency in Student Affairs Practitioners

Through my coursework in institutional research I’ve had the opportunity to take a class in statistics, a course typically not required in student affairs graduate preparation programs. Student affairs practitioners in general tend to shy away from quantitative methodologies, which may impact one’s ability to make sense of research or assessment projects. I hope to explore factors that promote this trepidation towards statistics. As a result of this inquiry, I hope to better connect practitioners as a whole to quantitative methodologies by connecting such practices to the research competency outlined by NASPA/ACPA, ACUHO-I, and various other professional associations in higher education and student affairs.

Curricular and Institutional Factors Promoting Growth in Classics Baccalaureate Programs

My current project explores curricular and institutional factors that are predictors of positive growth in classical studies baccalaureate programs. Using IPEDS data as the basis for my inquiry, I am attempting to pinpoint elements that are present in programs with positive growth (simply measured in terms of degrees awarded). The goal of this project is to generate practices that can be considered and/or implemented by various classics programs in post-secondary education.