Core Competencies

Whether a school has a designated Institutional Researcher or completes the work through collaborative teams, to be highly effective, institutional research practitioners need expertise in five core competency areas.

Core Competencies

Institutional Knowledge

Data Architecture

Excellent institutional researchers require knowledge of how and where data is stored at a school. Researchers need to know what information the school already has, how to most efficiently build and manage new databases, and how to unite data from multiple sources to construct usable data sets. They should understand a school's data governance practices, how databases are structured, and how to execute queries of those databases.

Data Analysis

Excellent institutional researchers need a strong background in statistics and quantitative analysis. They should be fluent in concepts like sampling and survey design, hypothesis testing, linear and non-linear regression analysis, machine learning algorithms, and the difference between correlation and causation. To execute these techniques, they need to be adept with data analysis software like Excel, Google Sheets, R, Qualtrics, SQL, SAS, STATA, Python, Google Data Studio, or Tableau.

Communication

Data Culture

Excellent institutional research is both the catalyst and product of a healthy data culture in a school. In a thriving data culture, faculty and staff grow their individual level of data literacy, they trust each other enough to invite unbiased assessment of their work, and they are secure enough to accept feedback about what is or is not working as believed within the community. In a healthy data culture, institutional research projects have an observable impact on systems and decision-making in the school. Institutions with a healthy data culture have the collective will to change and evolve.

the research project cycle

Resources

CIRIS Summer Fellows Lab