Election forecasting has become the centerpiece of media coverage of elections. Yet for all the attention paid to forecasting, public understanding remains low and increasingly distrustful. We can improve citizen knowledge and comprehension and increase student engagement by giving students the opportunity to develop their own election forecast.…

There are nearly one million credentials offered in the United States and approximately $1.9 trillion per year spent on education and training. Credential transparency enables stakeholders in learning and job ecosystems to explore and compare credentials in order to make better decisions about the best options for learning, advancement, and…

As institutions of higher education increasingly look to data as evidence to support planning, allocate resources, and inform teaching and pedagogy, ethical considerations regarding learning analytics have evolved from being on the margins to more central in the conversations surrounding institutional uses of student data. After outlining this…

This chapter discusses challenges to using data in a continuous improvement framework and describes the approaches some community colleges have used to overcome those challenges.

With the growing popularity of MOOCs and sharp trend of digitalizing education, there is a huge amount of free digital educational material on the web along with the activity logs of large number of participating students. However, this data is largely unstructured and there is hardly any information about the relationship between material from…

In 2019, legislators on both sides of the aisle in nearly every state proposed legislation addressing the use of data to inform decision-making to support students on their path to success. Through proposed legislation, many of these policymakers took steps to improve the foundational data systems and processes that make data work for students and…

This chapter discusses principles that support using data about teaching and learning and offers several strategies particularly well suited for use by institutional researchers at small colleges in helping faculty, staff, and administrators use data on student learning for improvement.

If universities want to survive into the century while maintaining relevancy to the business world and the global market, they must utilize innovative methods that engage students from the time of admission through graduation. Successful engagement equates to economic growth and positive branding. Students who are 'invested' and feel that the…

In this article, the authors discuss the use of Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) statistics to teach the concept of price elasticity of demand in an introduction to economics course. By using real data in its computation, they argue that instructors can create a value-adding context for illustrating and applying a foundational concept in…

Course selection can be a daunting task, especially for first year students. Sub-optimal selection can lead to bad performance of students and increase the dropout rate. Given the availability of historic data about student performances, it is possible to aid students in the selection of appropriate courses. Here, we propose a method to compose a…

The Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) has received an increasing number of questions from postsecondary educational institutions (institutions) on the conditions under which federal student financial aid information may be used for program evaluation and research purposes. Numerous federal laws govern access to, disclosure of, and use of…

As states continue movement toward ambitious attainment goals, many are calling increased attention to post-graduation outcomes--including workforce development and graduate impact on a state's economy. Along with state initiatives and task forces, an increase in workforce development legislation highlights a movement toward codifying progress.…

The increasing availability of digital data in higher education provides an extraordinary resource for researchers to undertake educational research, targeted at understanding challenges facing the sector. Big data can stimulate new ways to transform processes relating to learning and teaching, and helps identify useful data, sources of evidence…

In 2016, Dalhousie University's Research Ethics Board created an interdisciplinary working group to identify the key ethical challenges of SoTL research, with the overarching aim of recommending best practices and communicating these to researchers in order to support and expand the conduct of ethically sound SoTL research. This essay reflects on…

This chapter focuses on perspectives of external data reporting and their implications for institutional research offices and campuses as a whole. The authors examine a variety of uses for externally reported data and explore opportunities for using these data more fully across the institution.