Episode 76 - Brent Drake Research for Student Engagement

08/07/23 • 42 min

Brent Drake, has worked in higher education since 2001 with positions focused on institutional research, educational assessment, business intelligence, and institutional effectiveness. He has published and presented refereed conference sessions on research on student success initiatives, gateway course redesign, predictors of individual student success, enrollment management, business intelligence and data analytics, enrollment and student completion predictive modeling, recruitment, and enrollment trends. This includes co-authoring chapters on gateway courses in Talking About Learning Revisited: Persistence, Relocation, and Loss in Undergraduate STEM Education, and The Transfer Experience: A Handbook for Creating a More Equitable and Successful Postsecondary System, on data visualization in Building Capacity in Institutional Research and Decision Support in Higher Education, and on business intelligence and data analytics in New Directions for Institutional Research. He also was honored, along with his co-authors, with the Charles F. Elton Best Paper in Institutional Research in 2019 for their journal article on the signally effects of first-year seminar grades in The Journal of the First-Year Experience & Students in Transition.

Dr. Drake holds a baccalaureate degree in athletic training, a master's degree in sports Psychology, and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology with a joint focus on psychometrics and motivation theory all from Purdue University. He also taught for several years at Purdue, providing instruction in statistics, measurement theory, research methods, and motivational theory. He presently also serves as a Senior Research Fellow for the College of Education at Claremont Graduate University in California.

Prior to joining the full-time staff of the Gardner Institute, Dr. Drake served as a Research Fellow for the Gardner Institute conducting research on the relationship between the Institute’s institutional transformation efforts and student outcomes such as course grades, retention, persistence, and graduation. His most recent position prior to the Gardner Institute was as the Vice Provost for Decision Support at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he served for five years, and prior to that he worked at Purdue University for nearly 17 years ultimately serving as the Chief Data Officer for the final five years of his tenure.

He has served on serval relevant boards and committees including on the Executive Board of the Indiana Association of Institutional Research, a member of the inaugural University Innovation Alliance, the Indiana Postsecondary Data Access Group, and the Minority Serving Institutions Task Force at UNLV. Drake also served for seven years as a reviewer for The Journal of the First-Year Experience & Students in Transition.

Dr. Drake resides in Lafayette, IN with his wife Maria Drake and near his son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters. He enjoys reading, playing guitar, and intends to play pickleball until his knees cease to function.

To contact Brent, please email him at [email protected]

To contact Brent, please email him at [email protected]

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Episode 75 - Merrill Schwartz Understanding Governing Boards

Dr. Merrill Schwartz has over 35 years of higher education experience in administration, consulting and facilitation, research, writing, and program development, including 27 years with AGB and nearly a decade with The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars. Schwartz has held a series of progressively responsible positions at AGB in programs, research, consulting, and content. As senior vice president for content and program strategy, she was responsible for the association’s overall strategy for print and digital content development, including books, Trusteeship Magazine, research papers, and web resources as well as virtual and in-person events, including conferences, institutes, and webinars. Previously, as senior vice president for AGB Consulting, she worked with members and consultants to arrange over 150 governance-related engagements annually, ranging from board and presidential assessments to restructuring state systems. Recent grant-funded projects she has led focused on boards and equitable student success.

Schwartz co-authored Assessing Board Performance (AGB, 2018) and authored or contributed to more than twenty-five AGB reports, publications, and articles. Schwartz earned a PhD in higher education administration and leadership from the University of Maryland and MPA and BA degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The subject of her dissertation was Assessing the Performance of Academic Presidents.

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Episode 77 - Richard Arum Social Science Impact in Education

Richard Arum is professor with a joint appointment in sociology and education, as well as a courtesy appointment in criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). At UCI, he is the director of the Next Generation Undergraduate Success Measurement Project and faculty director of the Environmental Climate Change Literacy Project. He recently served as dean of the UCI School of Education, senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2013-2015; and director of the Education Research Program at the Social Science Research Council from 2006-2013, where he oversaw the development of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, a research consortium designed to conduct ongoing evaluation of the New York City public schools. He is author of Judging School Discipline: A Crisis of Moral Authority (Harvard University Press, 2013); coauthor of Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011); as well as coeditor of Improving Quality in American Higher Education: Learning Outcomes and Assessment for the 21st Century (Jossey Bass, 2016), Improving Learning Environments: School Discipline and Student Achievement in Comparative Perspectives (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study (Stanford University Press, 2007). He received a Masters of Education in Teaching and Curriculum from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.