Faculty Profiles
Dr. Amber Dumford
Professor, higher education and college student affairs
Email: dumford@usf.edu
Phone: 813-974-4697
Background
Dr. Amber D. Dumford completed her Ph.D. in Higher Education (with a cognate in Sociology) at the Pennsylvania State University. She also received a master’s degree in Public Administration and a baccalaureate degree in Mathematics, both from Indiana University Bloomington.
Teaching
Dr. Dumford started teaching in 2002 for the Mathematics Department at Hawaii Pacific University. She taught various undergraduate math courses (i.e., Statistics, PreCalculus, and Linear Algebra), both face-to-face for the two years that she lived in Hawaii and then online for an additional twelve years. She also taught graduate level courses for both Indiana University Bloomington (Strategies for Educational Inquiry several times—both online and face-to-face) and Concordia University Portland (Quantitative Research Methods and Scholarly Writing II – online).
Since joining the University of South Florida, Dr. Dumford has taught Student Affairs Assessment, Seminar in College Teaching, and Globalization in Higher Education. She plans on teaching many other courses on research methods and developing new courses on data analytics and institutional research. She currently serves on a number of doctoral students’ dissertation committees.
Research and Publications
Dr. Dumford became a member of the research analyst team at the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University Bloomington in June 2008, providing research and analytic support to both the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). She has authored or co-authored numerous articles in professional journals. In addition, she has produced countless reports for the research projects and grants on which she has served.
Dr. Dumford has presented various papers, speeches, and workshops at regional, national, and international professional conferences. Her research interests are varied but generally include factors that influence engagement and learning, gender issues in higher education, arts education, engineering education, creativity, quantitative reasoning, and data quality issues.
Recent Publications
Fletcher, E., & Dumford, A.D. (in press). Examining the 21st century skillset perceptions of high school students. Journal of Research in Technical Careers (accepted 9/3/21)
Fletcher, E., & Dumford, A.D. (2021). Preparing students to be college and career ready: Examining the relationship between career academy participation and student engagement in college and career preparatory activities. Career and Technical Education Research, 46(2), 23–41
Miller, A.L., & Dumford, A. D. (2021). Cleaning and reporting complex survey data:
What to do about skip logic and conditional response options. In Luhanga, U. & Harbaugh, A. G., Basic Elements of Survey Research in Education:
Addressing the Problems Your Advisor Never Told You About (pp. ). IAP - Information
Age Publishing, Inc.
Recent Presentations
Miller, A. L., & Dumford, A. D. (2021, November). Giving both freedom and
support: A look at perceived gains in collegiate honors programs. Poster accepted
for presentation at the Annual Convention of the National Association for Gifted Children,
Denver, Colorado.
Miller, A. L., & Dumford, A. D. (2021, November). Reconceptualizing successful
outcomes for the gifted: What can we learn from arts alumni?. Poster accepted for
presentation at the Annual Convention of the National Association for Gifted Children,
Denver, Colorado.
Miller, A. L., & Dumford, A. D. (2021, October). Training, education, & careers: Looking within institutions. Invited symposium to be presented the SNAAP Online Research Symposium, Virtual.
Fletcher, E., & Dumford, A.D. (2021, April). Examining the College and Career Engagement of High School Students. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Virtual.
Dumford, A.D., & Miller, A.L. (2021, April). That’s your cue: How A gendered understanding of social norms affects involvement on campus. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Virtual.
Service
Dr. Dumford currently serves on a number of university committees and councils. She also reviews for more than 20 national and international peer-review journals and serves on the board of a handful of top journals as well (i.e., Research in Higher Education and Journal of College Student Development). In addition, she has consulting on statistical modeling and survey development for the National Center for Educational Statistics and several institutions in both the United States and Canada.