College Athletics and the NCAA: How Research Shapes Policy
November 9-13, 2011
at the University of Oklahoma
Among the most important decisions made about college are those that occur at the boundary of academic and athletic performance. How are the academic rules set, and enforced? How and by whom are the thousands of challenges administered? Where is the accountability? How do we balance the interests of academic and athletic performance? How do answers to these questions differ across sports? Across gender? Across race? Part or all of the answer to each of those questions are defined and administered by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (the NCAA).
The NCAA enforces the rules, but there is a group of academic researchers who do research and advise the NCAA on the answers to these challenging and important questions. Called the Data Analysis Research Network (DARN), the group has been led by Jack McArdle from USC and James Jackson from Michigan; both are well-known research psychologists.
In this seminar, McArdle and Jackson will explore with students how the kinds of questions above are framed, how they are addressed using data collected by the NCAA from U.S. colleges and universities, and what the answers are. Students will learn about sophisticated research methods and principles from two experts who have been applying those in one of the most fascinating "natural laboratory" settings in existence – college athletics. In addition to discussing the research methods themselves, they will discuss some of the contentious and politically divisive moments in the history of DARN and the NCAA.
Books and Readings
Big-time sports in American Universities by C. T. Clotfelter
In the Arena: The NCAA's First Century by J. N. Crowley
The Case Against the SAT by J. Crouse and D. Trusheim
Choosing Elites by R. Klitgaard
Reading Packet
James S. Jackson is the Daniel Katz Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, and Director of the Institute for Social Research, all at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on issues of racial and ethnic influences on life course development, attitude change, reciprocity, social support, and coping and health among blacks in the Diaspora. He is past Director of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and past national president of the Black Students Psychological Association and Association of Black Psychologists. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Career Contributions to Research Award, Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, American Psychological Association, and recently received the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for Distinguished Career Contributions in Applied Psychology from the Association for Psychological Sciences. He is an elected a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences.
Dr. McArdle’s research has focused on age-sensitive methods for psychological and educational measurement and longitudinal data analysis including published work has been in the area of factor analysis, growth curve analysis, and dynamic modeling of adult cognitive abilities. McArdle is the director of the ongoing National Growth and Change Study (NGCS), a longitudinal study of cognitive changes over age in the entire USA. Since 1989, McArdle has worked as an academic consultant to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), where he has led the data analysis team for national research studies of college student-athletes.
Dr. McArdle is the Head of the Quantitative Area in the department of Psychology. He teaches classes in topics in psychometrics, multivariate analysis, and structural equation modeling, with an emphasis on longitudinal data and dynamic analyses. Since the Summer of 2000 he has also led the Advanced Training Institute on Longitudinal Modeling for the American Psychological Association.