Institutional Assessment

Institutional Assessment: A framework for strengthening organizational capacity for IDRCs research partners

The evaluation finds that the content of the World Bank s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) is largely relevant for growth and poverty reduction in the sense that it maps well with the determinants of growth and poverty reduction identified in the economics literature. However, some CPIA criteria need to be revised (in particular trade and finance), and one needs to be added (assessment of disadvantaged socio-economic groups). Second, the evaluation finds that the CPIA ratings are in general reliable and correlate well with similar indicators. The World Bank s internal review process helps guard against potential biases in having Bank staff rate countries on which their work programs depend. The CPIA ratings are found to correlate better with similar indicators for middle income countries than for low income countries. This could be because there is more information available on middle income countries, which increases the likelihood of different institutions having similar assessments on them. This could also be because the CPIA rating exercise takes into account the stage of development, which is more pertinent for low income countries, and which also subject the ratings of those countries to more judgment in an exercise that is already centered on staff judgment.

The enactment of 18th Constitutional Amendment in 2010 was followed by devo-lution of most of the functions of the erstwhile Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Live-stock (MINFAL) to the Provinces and the MINFAL was formally abolished on June 30, 2011. Instead, a new Ministry of National Food Security and Research was established1 for better execution of un-devolved functions as well as attaining and maintaining national food security. The functions assigned to the new Ministry are at Annex-1. This devolution of re-sponsibilities to provinces led to increased attention to agriculture2 with a common notion that there is a significant untapped potential for economic growth and employment creation associ-ated with productivity improvement of traditional crops and importantly diversification to-wards high-value and climate smart agriculture, including livestock, and post-harvest value addition. Unlocking this potential for all these components requires a transformative approach that would include major policy reforms, institutional changes, and a re-orientation of public resources away from wasteful subsidies to smart subsidies and productive public investments.

What can an institutional research leader do to ensure their unique roles do not place them or their institution in a legally challenging situation? In this monograph, IR practitioners, legal counselors, and scholars combine their expertise to examine unique legal challenges IR professionals face, offering guidelines for operating within legal boundaries and sustaining effective IR practices. Topics covered in this volume include: using legal precedents and law as a framework for guiding practice and policies; the latest on FERPA; dealing with security breaches; a review of employment, discrimination, harassment, intellectual property, and export control laws; recommendations for limiting liability; and how accreditation may change from voluntary to a contractual or even constitutional protections effort. This is the 172nd volume of this Jossey-Bass quarterly report series. Timely and comprehensive, New Directions for Institutional Research provides planners and administrators in all types of academic institutions with guidelines in such areas as resource coordination, information analysis, program evaluation, and institutional management.

This book presents a practical, effective, and systematic approach to the measurement, assessment, and sensemaking of institutional performance. Included are strategies to measure and assess the performance of Curriculum, Learning, Instruction, Support Services, and Program Feasibility as well as a meaningful Environmental Scanning method.

Multilevel modeling is an increasingly popular multivariate technique that is widely applied in the social sciences. Increasingly, practitioners are making instructional decisions based on results from their multivariate analyses, which often come from nested data that lend themselves to multilevel modeling techniques. As data-driven decision making becomes more critical to colleges and universities, multilevel modeling is a tool that will lead to more efficient estimates and enhance understanding of complex relationships. This volume illustrates both the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of multilevel modeling in IR. It introduces the fundamental concepts of multilevel modeling techniques in a conceptual and technical manner. Providing a range of examples of nested models that are based on linear and categorical outcomes, it then offers important suggestions about presenting results of multilevel models through charts and graphs. This is the 154th volume of this Jossey-Bass quarterly report series. Always timely and comprehensive, New Directions for Institutional Research provides planners and administrators in all types of academic institutions with guidelines in such areas as resource coordination, information analysis, program evaluation, and institutional management.

Recognizing that institutional effectiveness is important to both UNDP’s audit and evaluation functions, the Directors of IEO and Office of Audit and Investigations (OAI) undertook the Assessment of UNDP’s Institutional Effectiveness jointly, using both audit and evaluation methods. The UNDP Evaluation Policy and OAI Charter share the same purpose of supporting UNDP through oversight, review of governance, risk management practices and institutional learning. This Assessment report encompasses the joint findings and conclusions of the two offices for presentation to the Executive Board in 2017. The objective of this evaluation is to assess the extent to which policy and organizational measures, including the associated restructuring process, have enhanced or have the potential to enhance UNDP’s ability to deliver higher quality programmes and UNDP’s institutional effectiveness.

The focus of this volume is on the work of Institutional Researchers in a small college or university (SCUs) setting. At an SCU, the goal of the IR office is to balance the bureaucratic tendencies of data-driven decision making with the need for collegiality and collaboration. Drawing on numerous examples, it illustrates how IR professionals can leverage their positionality within the institution to design data flows to answer questions by serving as convergent thinkers, connecting disjointed systems and requests. This volume: identifies the challenges that small IR offices face reinforces the idea of collegiality as a defining feature of small IR offices discusses several principles for using data about teaching and learning explores the effects of low response rates in survey data and the effects of nonresponse bias demonstrates the importance of collaborative efforts in enacting change proposes a model of policy development focused on student success presents an effective model of SCU IR office development This is the 173rd volume of this Jossey-Bass quarterly report series. Timely and comprehensive, New Directions for Institutional Research provides planners and administrators in all types of academic institutions with guidelines in such areas as resource coordination, information analysis, program evaluation, and institutional management.