State education agencies play critically important roles in promoting research use in education. They influence policy design and implementation, collect data about schools and districts, and can use their statewide reach to advance research use within the state agency and in districts. As Carrie Conaway explains, the states that have done the…

Engaging with primary researchers during qualitative secondary analysis is a practice much recommended but rarely written about. In this article, I reflect on my experience of crossing an imagined boundary between the discrete textual dataset and its creators, of acknowledging and engaging with those researchers who invested in constructing the…

As the education and workforce development community looks more and more to CTE to help ensure students are both college and career ready, understanding and using CTE data and research becomes increasingly important. This is the first in a series of six practitioner training modules developed as part of the Career & Technical Education (CTE)…

This chapter provides an example of how one university's institutional research office played an active role in using data from institutional studies to guide the university toward courses ripe for change, faculty toward successful teaching strategies, students toward successful learning behaviors, and the university toward assessing the impact of…

This post is one in a series highlighting MDRC's methodological work. Contributors discuss the refinement and practical use of research methods being employed across the organization. Across policy domains, practitioners and researchers are benefiting from a trend of greater access to both more detailed and frequent data and the increased…

Data-informed instructional methods offer tremendous promise for increasing the effectiveness of teaching, learning, and schooling. Yet-to-be-developed data science approaches have the potential to dramatically advance instruction for every student and to enhance learning for people of all ages. Next steps that emerged from a recent National…

This paper addresses a relatively unexplored area in the field of learning analytics: how analytics are taken up and used as part of teaching and learning processes. Initial steps are taken towards developing design knowledge for this "middle space," with a focus on students as analytics users. First, a core set of challenges for…

According to federal data, African American students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended or expelled. As a school leader, what do you do when your heart is in the right place, but your data show otherwise? In "Solving Disproportionality and Achieving Equity", Edward Fergus takes us on a journey into…

This report describes how big data and an evidence framework can align across five contexts of educational improvement. It explains that before working with big data, there is an important prerequisite: the proposed innovation should align with deeper learning objectives and should incorporate sound learning sciences principles. New curriculum…

It's not exactly a well-kept secret: Despite the drumbeat for data that has echoed through the jungles of education for over a decade, its nuanced use to make decisions for students is rare. And even though state and national longitudinal data initiatives from the US Department of Education (ED) have increased the pressure, relatively few schools…

Nearly every high-priority item in national, federal, state, and local discussions about education--and policy proposals across the political spectrum--requires high-quality longitudinal data to inform its design, implementation, and evaluation. This factsheet shares Data Quality Campaign's (DQC's) analysis of what "Data for Action 2011: DQC's…

Policymakers across the nation are leading efforts to ensure that every classroom has an effective teacher. Faced with the need to dramatically improve student outcomes, states have embraced a policy agenda that promotes and supports teacher quality in many ways, including developing evaluation and compensation policies, targeting professional…

Making Connections was the Annie E. Casey Foundation's signature place-based, community-change initiative of the 2000s. It sought to build on previous work and launch an effort focused firmly on the framework of family strengthening. The Foundation started Making Connections in 22 places, focusing eventually on first 10, then seven sites. It…

As state policymakers strive to ensure that every student is taught by an effective teacher and is ready for college and 21st-century careers, they must also make drastic budget cuts. States cannot do more with less without collecting and using quality data to determine which programs and policies increase student achievement and the state's…

America can no longer afford an education system that fails to use data effectively to guide decisionmaking. The education sector is facing ever-increasing demands to improve student outcomes, reduce burden, increase efficiency, and improve transparency. These demands cannot be met without the strategic and effective use of data. Due to the…