Academic standards and performance outcomes are a major focus of the current Cycle 2 Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) audits. AUQA has clearly stated that universities will need to provide "evidence of setting, maintaining, and reviewing institutional academic standards and outcomes" (2010, p. 27). To do this, universities…

This discussion of the principal structures and factors that modify data in the decision making process considers individual-environmental structures in terms of their influences on data, as well as such factors as personality, cultural antecedents, data complexity, data load, task demand, and the individual's congruency with both the environment…

Recent trends indicate the increasing concern regarding the broad issue of accountability at institutions of higher education. Because of this, colleges and universities are being forced more and more to base their decisions on hard fact instead of intuition. The institutional research function is instrumental in assisting in this kind of data…

The School District of Philadelphia has had a continuously maintained computerized data system for its 270,000 pupils since 1967. This paper outlines: the general procedures and descriptions of the file; the need for establishing a pupil data-base file; the systems products and services; its value to research and evaluation as well as to the…

Course evaluation data can be a meaningful resource to improve the human resource development (HRD) practitioner's decision making. Recommended properties of an effective evaluation form are separation of the overall evaluation from the evaluation of specific aspects; a one-to-nine rating scale; strong, explicit verbal anchors on the rating scale;…

The experience of Western Michigan University in the design and implementation of a combined information/decision support center is described. The center's design was in response to the outcomes of a long-range planning process, which helped identify unmet user needs. Three types of support were found to be required: education and consulting,…

Costing principles are applied to a university by estimating unit costs and their component factors for the university's different inputs, activities, and outputs. The information system used is designed for Fribourg University but could be applicable to other Swiss universities and could serve Switzerland's universities policy. In general, it…

In this paper the theory that human thinking proceeds according to the computer model, or symbol manipulation, is reviewed and challenged. The research used as subjects five highly rated tournament chess players who "thought aloud" during a chess game to provide tape recorded protocols of decisions made while playing. These protocols…

This report describes the development in 1986 of a management information system by the Sacramento City (California) Unified School District for use in high schools. A nine-page attachment, which comprises two-thirds of the report, offers profiles of selected schools drawn from the databases. Data sets of 200 information items, collected from all…

There is increasing evidence that information system development and personnel development within an institution must not only be parallel in sophistication and noncontradictory in design, but also that concurrently developing programs are mutually supportive and increase the effectiveness of each far beyond the capability of either. Management…

This presentation discusses the products the South Carolina Department of Education derives from that State's management information system and traces the processes used to deliver those products to local school districts. Emphasis is on a description of the technical assistance the State department of education provides the local school district…

Statewide data collection systems emerged in the late sixties as the vehicle to achieving greater efficiency and accountability in higher education. The expectations of statewide systems were that they would meet the needs of various levels of management. The example presented in this paper is the Georgia management information system and its…

Possible impacts of changing information technology on the role of the institutional researcher, who serves as a decision support intermediary, are examined. Attention is directed to measurement, human information processing, and decision support technology. It is noted that management information systems are dependent on measurement for data…

A planning and evaluation model for management information systems (MIS) at the institutional or system level in higher education is presented. The procedure provides an analytical approach for assessing the effectiveness of an existing information system utilizing a variation of the Business Systems Planning methodology developed by the IBM…