The Institutional Research and Effectiveness (IR&E) office supports the mission of Drury University through the collection, analysis and reporting of data that informs planning and decision-making. Its commitment is to provide accurate information to the Drury community, governmental agencies and the public in a timely manner.
For more information please contact Deborah Derden at (417) 873-6939 or email dderden@drury.edu.
Drury University strives to maintain the highest quality institutional data so that it may accurately and consistently represent itself to both internal and external audiences. The Institutional Research & Effectiveness (IR&E) office encourages and supports the use of institutional data and analysis in decision-making. This policy regulates how institutional data and related statistics may be requested by members of the Drury community from IR&E and the ways in which that data may be communicated to third parties.
Aggregate results of some Institutional Research surveys and much of the data used for state and federal reporting purposes is considered public and will be posted on the IR&E page of the Drury website. Although this information is not subject to FERPA regulations, data posted on the IR&E page, and aggregate data released to you, should be handled with care.
If you need information that is not posted on the site, please use the Data Request Form on the IR&E webpage to make your request. A “data request” is defined as a request for information about Drury University students, courses, faculty, finances, research, or staff that is going to be used to support the administration of the University.
In almost all cases, data provided by the IR&E office will be aggregate-level, meaning that there are no individual identifying factors that can be tied back to specific students, faculty or staff on campus. Unit-record data, e.g. data with identifying factors, will only be released under very specific conditions: Requests by trustee members, senior administrators and faculty representatives of standing committees or academic departments for decision-support, institutional planning or departmental assessment, upon approval by the appropriate senior officer.
Under either condition, to be eligible to receive any data with identifying factors, the recipient must complete the FERPA tutorial located on the Human Resources Training website and acknowledge in writing that the data provided cannot be released to any other parties, including students (even for classroom use or research purposes).
College Navigator consists primarily of the latest data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the core postsecondary education data collection program for NCES – the National Center for Education Statistics” (NCES website 2016). An excellent resource for standardized, comparative information regarding institutes of higher education in the US.
The Common Data Set (CDS) initiative is a collaborative effort among data providers in the higher education community and publishers as represented by the College Board, Peterson’s, and U.S. News & World Report. The combined goal of this collaboration is to improve the quality and accuracy of information provided to all involved in a student’s transition into higher education, as well as to reduce the reporting burden on data providers. (CDS website 2016).
The Carnegie Classification represents one approach to identifying roughly comparable institutions. In other words, using their listings one can compare any institute of higher education to other, roughly comparable colleges or universities.
The Association for Institutional Research (AIR) is the world’s largest professional association for institutional researchers. The organization provides educational resources, best practices and professional development opportunities for more than 4,000 members. Its primary purpose is to support members in the process of collecting, analyzing, and converting data into information that supports decision-making in higher education. (AIR website, “About AIR” 2016).
HEDS is a consortium of private colleges and universities that collaboratively share, analyze, and use data of all kinds —institutional data, data from our six HEDS surveys, data from NSSE, the HERI Faculty Survey, and other national surveys — to advance their institutional missions. (HEDS website 2016).
