The United States (US) has accreditation agencies that assess higher education in a manner analogous to external examiners in the United Kingdom. An example accreditor, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, requires university-level Educator Preparation Program providers (EPPs) to evaluate the degree to which (a) their graduates feel prepared to assume their professional roles as a result of their EPP training and (b) their impacts on PK-12 students’ learning. These are meaningful forms of programmatic assessment, however, governmental agencies in the United States do not uniformly collect these data. This has required many EPP providers to do so, with unintended negative consequences. The authors use this context as a case study to examine what must be done when reporting guidelines do not align with the data available. Although a single example, readers are asked to consider analogous situations within their own contexts. Presented in this chapter is the accreditation landscape, a description of the challenges listed above, common solutions, and recommendations for greater coordination among stakeholders in order to expand the systematic conferral of data in safe, ethical, and meaningful ways.

Winthrop University is a public comprehensive university of about 6000 students, 5000 of whom are undergraduates. The Department of Mathematics offers a baccalaureate degree in mathematics, but has no graduate degree programs. As late as 2009, there was essentially no undergraduate research in the department. At this time, faculty made efforts to cultivate a research program that would motivate faculty to pursue more scholarly opportunities and include undergraduates in their scholarship. These efforts began with in-house-sponsored summer programs that lasted a few weeks and grew over the subsequent 5 year period to several externally funded undergraduate research programs, including a National Science Foundation-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates program. In this paper, we discuss some lessons we learned in developing a culture of undergraduate research. We focus on the advantages and challenges of undergraduate research at primarily undergraduate universities, offer advice for starting or growing a research program, and provide resources for funding undergraduate research.