Advancing the Science & Scholarship of Educational Transitions
The HIED ASSETS Lab is a research and translational scholarship hub dedicated to understanding and strengthening educational transitions. We study how students move toward, into, through, and beyond higher education, and how institutions can intentionally design environments, relationships, and supports that help students navigate those transitions successfully.
Our work brings together faculty, graduate students, undergraduate researchers, practitioners, and educational partners across the P-20 landscape to generate scholarship, develop and test practical interventions, and translate evidence into tools and practices that improve student transitions.
The mission of the HIED ASSETS Lab is to advance the science and scholarship of educational transitions through rigorous, collaborative, and practice-connected research. We generate knowledge about the psychosocial, institutional, and pathway conditions that shape student transitions and translate that knowledge into interventions, tools, professional learning, and institutional practices that expand opportunity and strengthen educational mobility.
We envision educational systems in which transitions are not left to chance. ASSETS seeks to become a collaborative center for scholarship and innovation that helps educators and institutions understand transition as a developmental process—and intentionally build the conditions students need to move successfully across educational boundaries.
Research → Translation → Development
ASSETS is intentionally designed to connect scholarship with practice. Our research asks consequential questions about educational transitions; our translational work turns findings into usable interventions, tools, and professional learning; and our apprenticeship model develops emerging scholars by involving students in authentic research from question formation through dissemination.
Our Three Pillars
ASSETS organizes its work around three interconnected pillars. Together, they allow us to examine educational transitions at the level of the student, the institution, and the systems that connect educational sectors.
What We Mean by Educational Transitions
Educational transitions are more than moments of enrollment. They are developmental periods in which students encounter new expectations, identities, relationships, systems, and ways of learning. Our work considers transitions across the educational continuum, including movement from K–12 into college, from undergraduate into graduate or professional education, and through pivotal transitions within higher education itself.
Research & Scholarship
The Lab supports quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, evidence-synthesis, secondary-data, archival, and translational research. Current and emerging lines of inquiry include student well-being and academic functioning; academic identity and learner agency; developmental and digital advising; mentoring and belonging; educational pathway design; dual and concurrent enrollment; graduate preparation and transition; and institutional approaches to student success.
Rather than treating these topics as isolated projects, ASSETS examines them through the Lab’s three pillars to build a cumulative body of scholarship about how students and institutions navigate transition.
From Scholarship to Practice
Research has greater reach when it can inform what educators and institutions actually do. ASSETS develops and studies practical applications of transition scholarship, including brief developmental interventions, research-informed workshops, advising and mentoring tools, transition-focused professional development, and resources for educational partners.
This translational orientation creates a feedback loop: practice helps surface important research questions, research strengthens the evidence base, and findings return to practice in forms that educators and students can use.
Student Research & Scholar Development
ASSETS is also a learning laboratory. Graduate and undergraduate researchers participate in authentic scholarly work with increasing levels of responsibility, supported by faculty mentorship and collaborative research teams. Depending on project needs and preparation, students may contribute to literature reviews, landscape scans, data management and analysis, evidence synthesis, archival inquiry, instrument development, qualitative research, manuscript preparation, presentations, and dissemination.
Our goal is not simply to give students research tasks. We seek to develop researchers who understand how questions are built, how evidence is evaluated, how methods serve inquiry, and how scholarship can be translated into meaningful educational practice.
Collaborate With ASSETS
ASSETS welcomes collaboration with students, faculty, schools, colleges and universities, community organizations, and practitioners interested in educational transitions. Partnerships may include collaborative research, student research experiences, data and evidence projects, professional learning, transition-focused program development, and opportunities to test or translate promising practices.
Join the ASSETS Exchange
Exchange ideas about educational transitions, student development, and the practice of higher education.