TENNAIR 2026

In today’s complex higher education environment, the need for actionable, data-informed assessment has never been more pressing. Amid shifting expectations and diverse stakeholder needs, the Meta-Assessment Rubric offers a structured, collaborative tool to evaluate and elevate institutional assessment practices.

This session explores how institutions can use the Meta-Assessment Rubric to create harmony by turning fragmented or underutilized assessment efforts into integrated, mission-aligned strategies. Just as a symphony brings together varied instruments to create harmony, the rubric provides a framework for aligning assessment efforts across programs, divisions, and institutional goals. Through real-world examples and interactive discussion, participants will gain insights into how a rubric fosters clarity, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Set in Nashville—a city built on the power of collaboration and innovation—this session invites participants to “find harmony” by transforming assessment challenges into opportunities for meaningful change.

The Office of Accreditation and Assessment (OAA) at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga implemented, as part of their outcomes assessment process, using a rubric to assess outcomes and associated information. By creating a rubric for assessing outcomes and the corresponding components, OAA is able to provide detailed feedback and guidance to programs, departments, colleges, and units across the institution. This rubric provides additional details and specific feedback related to the requirements of the outcomes assessment process and helps faculty, staff, and administrators recognize potential misalignments within outcomes assessment information.

A question that Walters State sought to answer for many years was "When is the best time to have an event on campus?" In 2025, we created a dashboard titled the "Campus Flow Dashboard" that helped constituents visualize when students arrived, when students were in class, when students were (probably) waiting on their next class, and when their day at WSCC ended. What we did not realize at the time was the number of different ways this dashboard would be used on campus. This session will look at the design of the Campus Flow Dashboard (including how to create your own), who uses the dashboard at WSCC, and some communication that we provided early on that probably helped it become more widespread than initially thought.

In this session, four experts will engage in a panel discussion on the evolution of institutional research (IR).  Aimed primarily at newcomers to the TENNAIR Conference and to early-career professionals, this concurrent session will delve into IR’s essential roles, responsibilities, effective practices, and future directions. The panelists, representing different sectors of Tennessee higher education institutions and levels of institutional research, will share insight into how IR has changed, what the field’s future directions and needs are, and how IR professionals can prepare for an increasingly data-driven enterprise. Participants will receive a packet of resources highlighting opportunities for continued development. 

The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is a relatively new and potentially game-changing position in the higher education landscape. In 2025, Lipscomb University aligned its IR/Analytics function with its newly appointed CRO to establish real-time insight and best practices for monitoring, forecasting, and projecting revenue. This presentation will showcase the first twelve months of the results of this work, with a special focus on the methodology and tools being used to create reporting solutions that supply the CRO, executive leadership, and finance team with strategic analytics for decision-making. The presentation will highlight the growing importance and opportunity that IR/Analytics offices have to make an outsized impact on their institutions' quest to maintain fiscal health and chart new frontiers for revenue generation.