Institutional Research and Assessment
Welcome to the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment.
Institutional Research and Assessment serves A&M-Central Texas by providing valid and reliable analyses of higher education information in support of planning, assessment, and policy formulation efforts; by coordinating research-based planning and evaluation efforts for the University’s academic and administrative units; and by guiding the University’s strategic planning processes to achieve our vision to be recognized as a source of innovative research and ingenuity.
Ethics Statement
Institutional Research and Assessment staff employed at Texas A&M University-Central Texas adhere to the Association for Institutional Research’s (AIR) Code of Ethics and Professional Practice policy.
Institutional Research and Assessment Staff
How can we Help?
Institutional research staff work to provide valuable data products to students, faculty, staff, and the community. Let us know how we can help you with your next project by sending an email to: IRE@tamuct.edu .
How Are We Doing?
Let us know how we are doing by completing our customer satisfaction survey .
Office Functions
Identify information needs
This functional area reflects the iterative process of identifying relevant stakeholders and their decision support needs. It includes anticipating questions through review of data, information, and research and policy studies, including those related to institutional, state, national, and international conversations around higher education. It also includes assisting stakeholders in developing and refining research questions.
Collect, analyze, interpret, and report data and information
This functional area reflects the technical tasks employed by institutional research to provide data, information, and analysis for decision support. It involves an understanding of the data available to answer pressing questions about student access and success and institutional operations and the process by which previously unavailable data are collected. The process of collecting and reporting required, and requested data is encompassed in this area. This function also incorporates applied research methods to analyze data to provide information for decision making, including appropriate interpretation of analysis results.
Plan and evaluate
Planning may include operational, budgetary, and strategic planning in which institutional research collaborates with other units at the institution, state, or related organizations. It may also include program review, particularly for accreditation purposes. Formative and summative evaluation processes conducted at an institution use IR data and analysis for planning and decision-making purposes.
Serve as stewards of data and information
This functional area highlights institutional research’s role in ensuring an institution-wide data strategy. Compliance issues such as privacy and security and ethical issues such as determining what data and information should be used for various purposes, and whether interpretations are correct and appropriately used, are also critical to this area. This area also includes the contribution of IR to data quality assurance activities. IR’s role in ensuring data are appropriately accessible and usable to those who need them to make decisions is inherent in this function as well.
Educate information producers, users, and consumers
This functional area encompasses the training and coaching related to the use of data, analysis, and information to inform decision making. Education can be focused on ensuring the ability to collect, access, analyze, and interpret information independently and in collaboration with other stakeholders. The function also includes a collaborative role in convening discussions related to information needs and connecting internal and external producers and users of data with one another for purposes of informing decision making. Scholarship to inform and improve data, information, and analysis for decision support is also included in this function.
