Journal of Higher Education Management 34, 2 (2019)

There are a number of obstacles that occur when collecting this type of data. First, making sure we have collected all the data – as there are many sources and opportunities for missed data. Second, the tendency to duplicate our counting. The arduous process of counting and evaluating each piece of data is challenging to make sure you really have a representation of what our students are actually doing. Third, how do you replicate the data? It would be great to have an institutional process where we can easily access this data but unfortunately, that is superficial and needs additional refinement and analysis. Creating a codebook format enables us to duplicate our efforts each year and by focusing on the individual student not just numbers, it limits the duplications and redundancies.

Expanding involvement Our long-term plan is to develop three different levels of research experiences. The freshman (or introductory) experiences will introduce students to research and creative activity in their discipline through observation and limited direct experiences. The second level is collaborative projects between faculty mentors and student researchers where students would become engaged in the research by working on projects for their faculty mentors. The third and final level of our vision are university scholars who with funding get to work on their own projects and contribute to scientific or creative discovery with innovation.

To execute this, we developed a multipronged approach to engage students. First, we need to recruit faculty and students who are interested in participating in student research and creative activity. Second, we need a way to connect interested students and faculty. Third, we need a system to connect students to opportunities beyond the borders of our university. Thus, we developed a relationship with an external partner to provide a single place/clearinghouse for students to search for opportunities and faculty to post opportunities. The challenge of course, is to get buy in from faculty and students to utilize the system - even when they have already selected a project and a student. Faculty have many responsibilities/obligations and adding additional steps/applications/processes can be met with resistance. Asking faculty to take on additional tasks without any compensation is also problematic. Nevertheless, the utilization of this clearinghouse can assist us data collection regarding student and faculty involvement that could reduce workloads in other places (filling out forms) and result in additional supports for faculty and students.

By providing different avenues of involvement through our strategic plan, students have the opportunity to participate in research and creative activities in a number of disciplines as well as in service learning practices.

Funding Funding is critical to any strategic plan. Base budget resources for ISRCA are limited, thus our strategic plans details a comprehensive funding strategy for long-term success. Our university, like many public universities, faces ever-tightening budgets. Thus, when developing a new institute it was critical to determine a funding plan for longevity.

We took a holistic view and identified the co-curricular university support services that are critical for student success. There are some areas where our institution currently serves our student population well, and other areas where additional supports and resources are needed.

This allowed us to target our funding plan to those areas where additional resources could make the biggest difference.

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