The significance (and challenge) of these developments was clear to administrators at the time. Though colleges like Yale and Harvard recorded (often on a daily basis) the academic and personal behaviors of their students, these tabulations were kept secret from students until graduation day when they were used to assign graduation day honors and prizes.[22]. scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in AACRAO's Student Records Management: Retention, Disposal, and Archive of Student Records (formerly Retention of Records) Hardcover – January 8, 2014 by Susan Nelson (Author), Julie Ferguson (Author), Wendy Kilgore (Author), Nora McLaughlin (Author), Jerry Montag (Author), Robert Morley (Author), Susan Van Voorhis (Author) & 4 more This general suspicion of government data collection—always visible in American history but now adorned with the specter of totalitarian governments—ran headlong into a federal government that was increasingly interested in collecting and analyzing data on the effectiveness of its social policy programs and that, thanks to advances in computer mainframe technology, was increasingly within its grasp. There remained a great number of details still to work out as schools shifted from dealing with students either strictly as aggregated statics (as in the school censuses) or as strictly wards of individual institutions. Let AACRAO Consulting help you simplify student record security. While schoolmen in the era of Horace Mann were able to produce 1,515 kinds of data about their students they were severely limited in their ability to preserve, analyze, or transmit this data. The Russell Sage report was followed by a report from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—Records, Computers, and the Rights of Citizens. See: “The Asilomar Convention for Learning Research in Higher Education,” (June 13, 2014), accessible at: See: Janet Weiss and Judith Gruber, “The Managed Irrelevance of Federal Education Statistics,” in The Politics of Numbers, ed. Among the most notoriously meddlesome statistics was average school attendance—considered the gold standard of evaluative metrics. Most schools resolved to establish specific schedules for destroying records deemed no longer valuable at precise time intervals. The increasing prevalence of transfer students forced schools to devise new, more precise ways to track students across institutions as students came to expect that their prior educational achievements would be recognized by subsequent schools. But while community colleges were successfully integrated into the higher education sector, attempts at more radical re-imaginings of higher education and the student transcript were decidedly less successful.

A number of states did not rely on the voluntary adoption of standardized practices like those outlined by AACRAO. Indeed, at a time when retention rates and gainful employment have become arbiters of institutional legitimacy, the information not recorded or prevented from being record on a student’s record—the applicant not enrolled, the course enrollment forestalled—becomes as important as the information that does. 5. 3 0 obj
While educators since the 1870s had the ambition to use all the information available about family background, physical health, personal disposition, and mental ability to predict student success and improve educational programs, our current ability to collect, combine, and calculate with these data is without precedent. Though a newcomer in the history of American education, it has become embedded in the expectations and work of people at all levels: students expect their past attainments to be honored and their academic credits to transfer from school to school; administrators expect to receive not only students but transcripts, test scores, and health records; and state and federal officials expect to receive regular updates on the aggregated educational status of various categories of students at all levels of the school system. Despite considerable investments of time, energy, and creativity these programs struggled to gain broad traction in postsecondary education. In this case, notably, the Asilomar Convention for Learning Research in Higher Education, in June of 2014, laid out a series of principles to inform the collection, storage, distribution, and analysis of data collected from digital learning platform.[81]. [18] For Stayer and Engelhardt, as with others in the field of child accounting, they viewed their work expressly in terms of system building, explaining “A system of records and reports which will cement an entire state and even the nation in its educational undertakings…has been recognized as one of the greatest needs.”[19] Though in rule of law and in practice there remained considerable variation in the extent and scope of student record keeping, the commitment to uniformity and comparability in records—as with so many other features of schooling (buildings, age-grading, etc.

NASPA is the leading association for the advancement, health, and sustainability of the student affairs profession. These sharply differing approaches, and the misleading statistical comparisons they invited, begat calls from prominent schoolmen to bring greater coherence to the nascent discipline of “student accounting.” Given the weak position of federal officials and strong defense of local control, the responsibility fell to professional organizations and professors to achieve this.

For the first time in the century-long history of student record keeping, the “student record” had been given a specific legal definition and its holder’s specific obligations. AACRAO Referral At the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), AACRAO International Education Services (IES) announced its intention to shift its mission from conducting foreign credentials evaluations to … Though seemingly straight-forward, the rub in producing this statistic was how to count students who had disappeared and stopped attending school. Drawing on the expertise of registrars, content area specialists, and psychometricians, ACE came up with a two-part solution to the problem of the “Accreditation of Service Experience.”. The other use for these systems was to provide a basis for expelling students. Stories abounded about the abuse of these rules by students who, committing themselves always to absences of no less than five days, were recorded in the school statics as having a “perfect” attendance record. But it did mark the beginning of a more serious efforts to systematize and streamline these efforts. Lumina’s outcomes-based approach focuses on helping to design and build an accessible, responsive and accountable higher education system while fostering a national sense of urgency for action to achieve Goal 2025. [59], It is not hard to understand the sense of urgency that administrators felt in encouraging schools to build bridges to these emerging entrants into the postsecondary space: a study of Illinois college students found a 70% increase in the number of transfer students in the five year period between 1967 and 1973;[60] and a 1974 Florida study found that transfer students accounted for over 60% of the upper level student enrollments in eight of the state’s nine public universities, with 65% of those transfer students coming from the state’s community colleges.
Though all of these pressures predate the current period in some form, major shifts in American political dynamics and in the availability of computing power and digital technologies have converged to amplify old concerns and produce new ones. Its principles of confidentiality and inspection almost perfectly mirror those in the HEW report.

If schools could not rely on each other to produce records in standardized, usable formats they risked calling into question the coherence of the sector and the status of giving and receiving institutions as peers. New registrars should add this task to the top of their to-do lists. Abstract: This paper provides a brief history of the development and evolution of the student record. Richard Ferguson, “Assessing Learning for Credit and Credentials” Jerry W. Miller and Olive Mills (eds). Given the student record’s location within the education system, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that a convening that seeks to re-imagine the student record also sets itself the task of re-imagining fundamental aspects of the education system: the definition of a student; the definition of educational achievement; the currency of achievement and the institutions that can issue it.