Rachelle L. Brooks, PhD directs research and assessment projects in higher education at Slover Linett Strategies. She brings 12 years of experience in outcomes assessment and educational research at both national and institutional levels. Dr. Brooks joined Slover Linett as a senior associate in early 2012 after being affiliated with the firm as a research fellow. Her work focuses on measuring prospect, student, and alumni outcomes and experiences.
Dr. Brooks is also the principal investigator of the Teagle Assessment Project, a four-year longitudinal study of undergraduates’ learning outcomes, which examines changes to critical thinking and post-formal reasoning in different disciplines. The study is ongoing at 13 leading colleges and universities and is funded by the Teagle Foundation.
Dr. Brooks teaches courses on assessment in higher education and the social contexts of education in Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy, Master of Science in Higher Education program. She has consulted with the Associated Colleges of the Midwest and the American Association of Geography.
Until 2011, Dr. Brooks directed the Center for Data Collection and Analysis at the College Sports Project, a Mellon Foundation-funded data-collection initiative at over 90 colleges and universities in the U.S. She managed this five-year longitudinal study, which reported annually to college presidents about the extent to which their student athletes were representative of the larger student body in terms of academic performance and graduation.
Dr. Brooks’ research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Teagle Foundation, the American Educational Research Association, and the Association for Institutional Research–National Postsecondary Education Cooperative and published in the Review of Higher Education, European Journal of Education, and New Directions for Institutional Research. She recently authored a chapter in the edited volume, Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment (Teagle, 2011). Dr. Brooks presents regularly at the annual meetings of the Association for Institutional Research, the American Educational Research Association, and the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
From 2000 to 2005, Dr. Brooks worked in Washington, DC at the Association of American Universities on a project which investigated ways to improve measurement of the quality of university education and research. She earned a PhD in political science from Rutgers University and a BA from the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio.
