Date of Award
12-13-2010
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Educational Leadership, Ed.D.
First Advisor
Amany Saleh
Committee Members
Daniel Cline; David Cox; Gilbert Fowler; Steve Bounds
Call Number
LD 251 .A566d 2010 M38
Abstract
Every institution of higher education in the United States must, in order to award degrees and financial aid, be recognized by an accrediting organization under the guidelines and oversight of the US Department of Education. This process of recognition is known as accreditation. The current procedure of accreditation involves revisits every ten years. This ten-year methodology was recently under review by the Higher Learning Commission and changes were made which resulted in the abbreviation of this time span. Both the general idea of accreditation and the immediacy of the timeline for revisits hold great importance for institutions of higher education. Via an investigation of the world of accreditation in higher education, it became immediately evident that institutions are not currently equipped to abbreviate the timelines without changes in their current business processes as they relate to accreditation visits. More specifically, the process of institutional assessment stands as a negative aspect to accreditation existing as a superfluous expenditure of time and money. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to build a model questionnaire matching against the semantics of the five criteria as delineated by the Higher Learning Commission for accreditation by utilizing the components of each criterion. The intended outcome of the questionnaire, and thus the reason for this study, was to offer an institution of higher education a more expedient vehicle to a systematic image of the institution in regard to the five criteria established by the Higher Learning Commission for accreditation. The data presented represents the results of a quantitative study examining the developed survey tool utilized by two groups of institutions. The first group of institutions included those with pending accreditation visits. The second group of institutions included those having completed accreditation visits within two previous years of the study. Research results indicated that the generated survey was capable of assessing an institution based on the semantics of the criteria for accreditation. Research results also illustrated that the use of the Likert scale to assess respondent opinions allowed for the delineation of strengths and weaknesses related to the accreditation criteria in regard to preparedness. Moreover, the research results produced significant findings in support of the developed survey's capability to predict the outcomes of an accreditation visit.
Rights Management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Miles, Michael David, "Development of an Accreditation Assessment Survey Using the Higher Learning Commission's Five Criteria for Accreditation of Higher Education Institutions" (2010). Student Theses and Dissertations. 954.
https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/954
