Humans possess a remarkable ability to recognise both simple patterns such as shapes and handwriting and very complex patterns such as faces and landscapes. To investigate one small aspect of human pattern recognition, in this study participants position lines of "best fit" to two-dimensional scatter plots of data. The study investigates…

Classroom level data driven decision-making (DDDM) involves the use of data to identify patterns of performance that reveal students' academic strengths and weaknesses relative to established learning goals, and the planning of instructional practices to support academic success for all students. Although DDDM is not a new paradigm in education,…

This paper describes three spreadsheet exercises demonstrating the nature and frequency of type I errors using random number generation. The exercises are designed specifically to address issues related to testing multiple relations using correlation (Demonstration I), t tests varying in sample size (Demonstration II) and multiple comparisons…

As educators, we need to stop fearing data and embrace its power. This article discusses how classroom teachers can design, implement, and analyze longitudinal assessments to diagnose issues related to student achievement and meet the demands of our evolving data-driven educational culture. Practical advice on exam production and data analysis…

In education, data-driven decision making is a buzz word that has come to mean collecting absolutely as much data as possible on everything from attendance to zero tolerance, and then having absolutely no idea what to do with it. Most educational organizations with a plethora of data usually call in a data miner, or evaluator, to make some sense…

Teachers and students increasingly enjoy unprecedented access to abundant web resources and digital libraries to enhance and enrich their classroom experiences. However, due to the distributed nature of such systems, conventional educational research methods, such as surveys and observations, provide only limited snapshots. In addition,…

This study investigated an innovative approach of program evaluation through analyses of student learning logs, demographic data, and end-of-course evaluation surveys in an online K-12 supplemental program. The results support the development of a program evaluation model for decision making on teaching and learning at the K-12 level. A case study…

The data illustrate outliers that are not mistakes and not observations that are unusually high or low. The reasons for them are all interesting historically. They illustrate that "outliers" need not be errors but may instead be particularly interesting cases. The data also illustrate that different data displays may differ in their ability to…

This set of activity sheets requires students to organize and display data with a box-and-whiskers graph. Students use the plot as a summary display to detect patterns and to highlight the important features of the data for purposes of comparison. (PK)