The extent to which teachers collect, interpret, and use information from multiple data sources is a key distinction between novice and expert data users. Understanding and exploring this dimension of teachers' instructional decision making requires a shift in contemporary perspectives toward the interconnectedness of data sources within teachers'…

State education data systems help policymakers use data to evaluate the impact of their efforts to improve education. By disaggregating the data -- that is, breaking it out by different student subgroups -- policymakers can ensure that their efforts address the needs of students who have been traditionally underserved in educational settings. Yet…

Most distance learning institutions collect vast amounts of learning data. Making sense of this 'Big Data' can be a challenge, in particular when data are stored at different data warehouses and require advanced statistical skills to interpret complex patterns of data. As a leading institute on learning analytics, the Open University UK instigated…

Individuals have difficulty changing their causal beliefs in light of contradictory evidence. We hypothesized that this difficulty arises because people facing implausible causes give greater consideration to causal alternatives, which, because of their use of a positive test strategy, leads to differential weighting of contingency evidence.…

Never before has the link between a college education and postgraduate job prospects been more important. College graduates are employed more often and, on average, earn significantly more than those without college degrees. During recent years, as students have moved into a challenging job market, a college education has remained the most…

Increasing demands for accountability from both the public and the government have resulted in increasing pressure for higher education professionals to use data to support their choices. There is significant speculation that professionals at all levels of education lack the knowledge to implement data-driven decision making. However, empirical…

Liberal arts universities are under mounting pressure to maintain their position of relevance in an increasingly technological and economically competitive world, while professional journalism is steadily losing ground to social media. This essay argues that a new partnership between journalism schools and the academic community would be…

Student feedback surveys are an important component of the continuous improvement cycle at the University of Newcastle. This article describes a recently adopted holistic approach to collecting, analysing, reporting and acting on student feedback on courses (units of study), programs (collection of courses leading to an award) and the student…

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of using renewable energy data, obtained from a comprehensive data acquisition system, on improving students' learning and developing their higher-order learning skills. This study used renewable energy data available through a data acquisition system installed and tested by the Green Research…

America brims with education data and these days it seems everyone in education claims to be guided by data. In this book, leaders and scholars map the landscape of data providers and users and explores why what is supplied by the former but frequently fails to meet the needs of the latter. It documents the barriers to collecting good information,…