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    Chris Schmader, Doctorate

    Research Analyst
    UNC Wilmington
    Wilmington, North Carolina, United States

    Dr. Chris Schmader works as a research analyst in Student Affairs Assessment, Research, and Planning at UNC Wilmington. He has nearly 10 years of experience conducting assessement and IR studies in higher education contexts. These projects have included assessments of institution-wide learning outcomes, studies of the association between high-impact practices (HIPs) in Student Affairs and student retention rates, and analyses of tutoring programs' impacts on GPAs. Across these projects, he has emphasized data visualizaitons that capture the full range of information necessary for effective decision-making, including information about uncertainty in results derived from small- or medium-sized datasets. He has a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University, where he studied how people use social context to infer the intended meanings of words in conversation; in his assessment and IR work, he draws on lessons from his doctoral research when communicating about data and consulting with Student Affairs practitioners on their own assessment projects.

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