Institutions To Consider The Nature And Function And Learn

The research questions for this dissertation are as follows: 1) What is institutional research, and what is not? What functions does it serve? 2) What relationship is there between the nature and the functions of institutional research? What factors guarantee the realization of these functions? 3) Can we draw any lessons from American institutional research? If yes, how should we draw them?Focusing on these questions, this research comes to the basic conclusion that institutional research is a kind of research done in a institution, comprising analyses and advisory research based on the situations and targeted toward the practical problems in the administration of the particular higher education institution, and that the research is a specialized practice carried out by a college or a university to improve the decision-making and polices for its good operation. Institutional research serves a university two main functions: 1) providing services in data and information; 2) providing advisory services for decision-making. The functionality of institutional research is dependent on the following two factors: 1) the methodological basis for the research, i.e., the validity of institutional research. This requires that the research should abide by the formula used by general scientific research and make use of scientific methodologies in data collection, data analysis, data interpretation and reporting. 2) the reporting relationship structure guarantee for the combination of institutional research with decision-making, i.e., the directness of the advisory service. This derives from the smooth communication between the researcher and the decision-maker and is reliant on a good organizational design. American institutional research owes its success to the fine operation of these two factors. This also helps explain why similar practices in China have not led to much fruition.On the basis of the above analysis, in order to promote the administrative efficiency of China's universities and the sustainable development of China's institutional research, we feel an urgent need to draw on the experience and the mode of American institutional research. At the present stage, problems to be resolved include: 1) to construct the modem concept for university administration, in which the traditional philosophy of university administrators' experience-based decision-making is replaced by it based on scientific rationality; 2) to analyze the role of higher educational research institute in a China's university, and to update its organizational design and function to provide guarantee for the effective practice of institutional research; 3) to facilitate the development of data resources in China's universities, to enhance data sharing between institutions, and to construct institutional databanks capable of satisfying the needs of institutional research; 4) to integrate the fostering of personnel in institutional research into the postgraduate training in fields of higher education studies, to develop a China-specific degree system for awarding EdD's and EdM's in higher education administration, with the aim to cultivate specialized personnel competent at institutional research; 5) to establish national organizations of institutional research for the purpose of promoting practices of institutional research in China and improving the specialized proficiency of the researchers.