Editors’ Note

Abstract

The New England Educational Assessment Network (NEEAN) is the sponsoring organization for the Journal of Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness (JAIE). A long-time member of the Board of Directors, Richard “Dick” Gerber, has retired and has become the first Emeritus member of the Board. Dick was the founding editor of JAIE when it began in 2010. He has had an illustrious history with NEEAN. In 1999 he was appointed program director because, as he put it, he and a colleague “complained most annoyingly,” which led to their being told “in the time-honored tradition of the academy, that if they disapproved of the current NEEAN, they should join up and fix it!” (Gerber, 2010, p. 107). Shortly after, in 2001 he became President of the Board.In 2007 Gerber stepped down from that position “to found the Journal now in your hands” (Gerber, 2010, p. 115). He became Parliamentarian in 2009, a position he held until he was elevated to Emeritus status in 2022. My (RJS) first exposure to Dick’s boundless enthusiasm for assessment was in NEEAN’s annual Fall Forum in 2004, and at later NEEAN meetings his subsequent excitement for founding and publishing JAIE was palpable and infectious. After I became one of the editors, my favorite part of editing the journal was his praise for the work whenever an issue has come out.The articles in this issue continue the tradition of excellence Dick began in 2010. Two topics of interest emerge in the articles and book reviews, reflecting the two foci of the Journal, assessment and institutional effectiveness. On the assessment side, one article and one book review explore high-impact educational practices (Kuh, 2008)—student research and problem-based learning. On the institutional effectiveness side, two articles address program review, and one article addresses assessment committees. A book review explores another aspect of institutional effectiveness that is of great current interest—equity and access.Reichle reports on an extensive evaluation of a model for supporting undergraduate research, one of the high-impact practices in higher education. He reports on and shows how to address the challenges facing data collection on student research that will be familiar to institutional research offices. In particular, he describes “the challenge of the count,” or the difficulty of just being able to identify all the undergraduate research projects conducted across a university. Reichle systematically identifies all the contexts for undergraduate research (in and out of courses, for credit or volunteer) and describes methods for connecting with all of those contexts. In the process he demonstrates a valuable role for a central clearinghouse research advising office in supporting student research. A review of Michael McDowell’s Rigorous PBL by Design explores the merits of project-based learning (another high-impact practice) from an assessment perspective.Two articles address program review. Lucas, Marcum, and Higgins introduce a novel method for reviewing the quality of a doctoral program in criminology, using quantitative and qualitative data in a survey of graduates of the program. Senter, Ciabattari, and Amaya, on the other hand, question the value of program review by surveying chairs of Sociology departments throughout the United States. They acknowledge the value with regard to accountability, but note that many department chairs consider the extensive work of program reviews not to be a good use of their time because it often does not have any impact. However, when upper-level administrators use the information from program review to make decisions about departments that lead to positive change, more positive attitudes result.In related work, Buscher and Humphrey report on an extensive qualitative analysis of assessment committees, a common fixture in higher education institutions. They find that an important factor in the success and engagement of assessment committees is administrative support and responsiveness. They also make a number of recommendations to enhance the work of assessment committees. They note the importance of shared leadership and responsibility among faculty members on the committees: administrative support with a focus on developing (or creating) an “assessment infrastructure” to support the elusive culture of assessment. They provide a clear view of methods for achieving those goals.The second book review, of Paul LeBlanc’s Students First: Equity, Access, and Opportunity in Higher Education, explores another high-profile issue in higher education. One of the issues addressed is affordability, which is of increased interest in higher education, as evidenced by the work by a number of institutions in efforts to create and enable opportunities for three-year degrees (e.g., Marcus, 2022; Whitford, 2021).