The Vermont Agency of Education (AOE), through funding from a 4.9 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is in the final stages of developing and implementing a Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) to support the work of the AOE and Vermont school districts. A significant portion of the federal award supports the creation…

As communicated via a November 2017 memo (see ED610130), the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE), in collaboration with their implementation vendor Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), has been working to finalize the design, development, and testing of a Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS). Through its Vertical Reporting processes, the SLDS will…

In 2012, the Vermont Agency of Education (Agency) was awarded a Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grant from the United States Department of Education (USDOE). The nearly $4.95 Million SLDS grant award will be used to fund the Vermont Automated Data Reporting (VADR) project. The VADR project will establish a K-12 data system that will…

The SSIP [State Systemic Improvement Plan] Phase II Process Guide describes the steps needed to accomplish the work of the three components of Phase II. Thus, the SSIP Phase II Process Guide is organized according to the following sequential phases of work to be done, rather than by the three components: (1) Kicking off Phase II; (2) Developing…

In a competitive employment climate, college graduates with visual impairments (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) face challenges securing work. Employment barriers among visually impaired individuals include: limited early work experience, negative employer attitudes, transportation issues, lack of exposure to successful role…

Education research provides a range of curricular reform options that can lead to improved student course outcomes. These options can appear easy to implement with the hope of immediate increases in student learning. In 2006 the Ithaca College Physics Department went down this path by moving all of their 100-level courses out of lecture halls and…

Microfabrication is a critical area to many branches of science and engineering. However, to many students accustomed to seeing transistors as things that come in a lab kit, it is an obscure subtopic of their discipline. Beginning in 2009, the authors undertook a broad multidisciplinary approach to bring microfabrication into all aspects of the…

Stakeholder access and the capacity to use quality data will make or break successful implementation of education policies. To ensure effective implementation, parents, teachers, and policymakers must have access to robust, quality data--including information beyond summative test scores. Quality data must include longitudinal data that are linked…

Over the past five years, the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education (NRCCTE) has sponsored five research studies of Programs of Study (POS)--including three ongoing longitudinal projects--with the goal of informing the field about how and under what conditions POS impact student engagement, achievement, and transition to…

This article provides a broad overview of the history of career-focused education in the United States and the reauthorization of the federal Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Improvement Act of 2006. The Perkins act required that the recipients of its funding offer at least one program of study, and this reauthorization included four…

To meet demands for accountability, most schools and departments of education at institutions of higher education (IHEs) gather information on their current students and graduates. This paper describes issues to consider when designing a longitudinal data collection and management system, drawing on seven years' experience developing such a…

E-learning researchers face considerable challenges in creating meaningful and generalizable studies due to the complex nature of this dynamic training medium. Our experience in conducting workplace e-learning research led us to create this guide for planning research on e-learning. We share the unanticipated complications we encountered in our…

Five years ago, the editor of "Exceptional Parent" Magazine requested the author to provide an account of a day in the life of the National Children's Study, an ambitious study by the federal government that aims to find out how the environment affects child health and development. Planning and implementation of the National Children's Study has…

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:…

A three-level variance decomposition analysis was used to examine the sources of variability in implementation of a technology-enhanced progress monitoring system within each year of a 2-year study using a randomized-controlled design. We show that results of technology-enhanced progress monitoring are not necessarily a measure of student…