States must prioritize ensuring that families can use their state's report card to make decisions for their students. But DQC's "Show Me the Data" review of 2021 state report cards found that these resources were not up to the task of providing families with the information they need. From translations to visualizations, data is most…

The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) has been reviewing state report cards for the past seven years. They continue to examine the landscape of state report cards because they believe states must increase transparency and build trust by sharing information. But after many years, it was time to look at state report cards with fresh eyes. In addition to…

When a school district in North Dakota began having hard conversations about its struggling status, a simple, yet crucial, contributor to academic success became abundantly clear: student attendance. That conversation laid the groundwork for a districtwide project, enacted in partnership with the Region 11 Comprehensive Center (R11CC), North…

Child Trends and Start Early have partnered to better understand what early childhood systems builders need to build and support more equitable systems. The briefs in this series, called Conversation Starters, define a new framework for early childhood systems that center families' experiences and raise key considerations and next steps for…

Purpose: Organizational learning (OL) has been conceptualized as a critical component in school change processes. Nevertheless, OL in the school context is still somewhat obscure and difficult to comprehend, thus it is rarely translated into operational structures and processes and later permanently sustained. The purpose of this study is to…

The purpose of these guidelines is to support the execution of cost analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis of educational programs. The steps involved in conducting a cost analysis are presented in four stages with explicit examples used throughout: designing your cost analysis, collecting cost data using the ingredients method, analyzing cost…

Multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) has increasingly been a topic of discussion within the learning analytics community. The Society of Learning Analytics Research is home to the CrossMMLA Special Interest Group and regularly hosts workshops on MMLA during the Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI). In this paper, we articulate a set of 12…

CCNetwork, in many cases, begins their work by assessing client needs--speaking with clients, examining current evidence and data, reviewing documents, and identifying patterns across those. Needs-sensing methods are important inputs to helping shape and prioritize what CCNetwork does. Landscape scans take these efforts a bit further by helping to…

Youth apprenticeship is a strategy for building a more inclusive economy by creating affordable, reliable, and equitable pathways from high school to good jobs and college degrees. As youth apprenticeship programs develop and expand across the U.S., it is critical that practitioners develop plans for capturing, analyzing, and leveraging data at…

"The Forum Guide to Strategies for Education Data Collection and Reporting (SEDCAR)" was created to provide timely and useful best practices for education agencies that are interested in designing and implementing a strategy for data collection and reporting, focusing on these as key elements of the larger data process. It builds upon…

Geography provides context to the information collected, tabulated, and disseminated by the Census Bureau, whether data for the United States as a whole, a state, a congressional district, a county or city, or a census tract (roughly the size of a neighborhood). Geographers perform the activities necessary to update and maintain the geographic…

As the competition for student enrollment has increased over the past several years, the pressure on the enrollment manager has increased proportionally. Managing enrollment expectations for institutional stakeholders requires effective communication, leadership, and the sharing of data with effective context. This article provides guidance on how…

Child Trends and Start Early have partnered to better understand what early childhood systems builders need to build and support more equitable systems. The briefs in this series, called Conversation Starters, define a new framework for early childhood systems that center families' experiences and raise key considerations and next steps for…

California's information about opportunities and outcomes in early learning and care, TK-12 schools, colleges, social services, and employment is currently disconnected. A longitudinal data system can be a powerful tool that allows California to identify bright spots, inequities, and roadblocks in our educational system, especially for students of…

The increasing use of geographic information system (GIS) technology in various fields suggests the need for professionals, including those in Extension, to be mindful of communicating data accurately and effectively. This article examines approaches to creating classes or groupings within data as well as the weaknesses of each approach. Data…