Purpose: A recurring frustration in educational research is the tendency for school leaders to implement reforms in ways that prioritize compliance over more substantive improvements to practice. Drawing on new institutional theory and sensemaking theory, this article explores the different ways leaders respond to continuous improvement (CI)…

Ithaka S+R's Research Support Services program's most recent project, "Supporting Big Data Research," focused specifically on the rapidly emerging use of big data in research across disciplines and fields. As part of this study, they partnered with librarians from more than 20 colleges and universities, who then conducted over 200…

Recent calls to reform undergraduate biology education, including Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education, have led biology departments to examine their curriculum to determine the extent to which it aligns with Vision and Change content and competency recommendations. The recently released BioSkills Guide translates the broad Vision…

School leaders are assumed to be important for the implementation of data-based decision making (DBDM), but little is known about changes in leadership during this implementation. Educational leadership was measured before, during, and after a two-year, school-wide DBDM intervention in 96 primary schools. Advanced analysis techniques were applied:…

Equity is not just about what colleges do: it is also about who they are, what they believe, and how they are situated within society at large. Equity-minded coaching seeks to make visible the social and structural context of exclusionary practices embedded within the leadership and institutions of American higher education. Equity-minded coaches…

A prominent goal of colleges and universities today is to enact data-driven teaching and learning. Faculty clearly play a key role, and yet they tend to have limited time, a lack of training in assessment or education research, and few incentives for engaging in this work. We describe a framework designed to address the practical and cultural…

The use of open textbooks in universities is according to some organisations changing the higher education landscape and is promising for the mainstream adoption of OER. The aim of this paper is to analyse authors' views of agency and empowerment when they plan, create and reflect on their open textbooks, their teaching and students' learning.…

Many traditional Information Systems (IS) programs are either redesigning current courses to incorporate business/data analytics or expanding curricular offerings to include business /data analytics; our IS program chose the former route to meet the demand (from employers) for business/data analytics. In that transition, a traditional systems…

The Responses to Educational Disruption Survey (REDS), conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), studied how teaching and learning were affected by the disruptions caused by COVID-19 and aimed to paint a picture of national responses to the global pandemic. REDS was based on the premise that…

This case is designed to highlight issues related to data inquiry in education, the role of leaders (specifically building-level administrators) in setting conditions for effective data conversations on teams, and the challenge of developing and deepening data use in a school over time. It was created based on interviews with a real elementary…

In recent years, the role of school principals in providing leadership, and the impact of that leadership in promoting teacher professional development for building school capacity has attracted increasing attention worldwide. The study described in this paper explores the practices of leadership for promoting school-based teacher professional…

The implementation of educational reforms requires behavioral changes from the teachers involved. Theories on successful behavioral change prescribe the following conditions: teachers need to possess the necessary knowledge and skills, form strong positive intentions to perform the new behavior, and have a supporting environment for change.…

Often the stakeholders most affected by curriculum change are uninvolved in the change process, leading to curriculum reforms that fail. Thus, a group of university researchers conducted a small-scale study to explore the thoughts and opinions of parents and elementary students on the use of mathematics and science graphic novels to support the…

Each year teachers and principals in schools across Australia invest much time and effort, and considerable expense, in activities related to communicating student learning progress. However little is known about the effectiveness of these activities, including the extent to which they are valued by stakeholders, whether they are considered to…

With the arrival of online survey tools that are low-cost, readily available and easy to administer, all organizations have access to one of the most effective mechanisms for determining quality improvement priorities and measuring progress towards achieving those priorities over time. This case study outlines the use made of this simple tool by a…