Research considers collaboration to be a significant factor in terms of how teachers use data to improve their practice. Nevertheless, the effects of teacher collaboration with regard to teachers' individual data use has remained largely underexplored. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the interplay between collaboration and the personal…

There is a pervasive need for school systems to empirically and reliably assess the data literacy and data use skills of their educators (Ingram et al., 2004). With the federal government holding states and school districts accountable for student achievement and the increased emphasis of high stakes testing in schools, it is also critical to be…

This report describes and explains how to use the School Survey of Practices Associated with High Performance, which measures the degree to which schools are engaging in practices associated with high performance. State education departments and school districts can use the survey results to identify and describe school practices associated with…

This report reviews the major international and regional large-scale educational assessments, including international surveys, school-based surveys and household-based surveys. The report compares and contrasts the cognitive and contextual data collection instruments and implementation methods used by the different assessments in order to identify…

In this commentary, we examine Braverman's insights into the trade-offs between feasibility and rigor in evaluation measures and reject his assessment of the trade-off as a zero-sum game. We, argue that feasibility and policy salience are, like reliability and validity, intrinsic to the definition of a good measure. To reduce the tension between…

In this article, the authors present a German Sense of Community (SOC) Scale for use in military settings. The scale is based on the translation and field-testing of an existing U.S.-based measure of neighborhood SOC (Peterson, Speer, & McMillan, 2008). The methodological intricacies underlying cross-cultural scale development are highlighted, as…

Effective teaching has long been an issue of national concern, but in recent years focus on the effectiveness of programs to produce high-quality teachers has sharpened. Long-standing achievement gaps persist despite large-scale legislative changes at the federal and state levels, and American students continue to show poorer performance on…

The idea that teaching practices could be improved through better data systems has captured the imagination of policy makers, researchers and foundations. However, the concept of data use itself is so ill-defined as to suggest that it is more of a panacea than a coherent reform proposal. This paper examines the concept with an eye toward what we…