The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) partnered with 15 elementary schools to obtain and analyze student-level daily attendance records for 6,390 students. Schools ranged in size from just over 100 students to more than 600 students. Geographic locations also varied with 4 schools located in a city, 4 in a suburb, 4 in a town, and 3 in a rural…

The authors have developed a visualization tool to assist higher education stakeholders in exploring options in higher education performance and accountability. The tool allows users to visualize quickly differences between programs and institutions along a number of dimensions. This report draws five insights from the visualization tool: (1)…

College readiness remains a large policy challenge for both K­-12 schools and higher education institutions. Students who need to pursue remedial coursework before being able to enroll in introductory college requirements face financial and logistical challenges that create barriers to degree progression. In an effort to gain additional…

The importance of teacher effectiveness is well supported by studies that document variation in teachers' abilities to contribute to student achievement gains. All else being equal, students taught by some teachers experience greater achievement gains than do students taught by other teachers. In response to initiatives to increase educator…

This report describes statistical analyses performed on data collected in the Spring of 2015 from the pilot study of proposed revised and new items in the IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction (SRI) system. Described are the methods employed, results obtained, and decisions made in selecting items for the updated instruments. The procedures occurred…

Year after year, in every state and community in our nation, students from low-income families are less likely than other students to reach advanced levels of academic performance, even when demonstrating the potential to do so. These income-based "excellence gaps" appear in elementary school and continue through high school. It is a…

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania plans to develop a new statewide evaluation system for teachers and principals in its public schools by school year 2013-2014. To inform the development of this evaluation system, the Team Pennsylvania Foundation (Team PA) undertook the first phase of the Pennsylvania Teacher and Principal Evaluation…

The following report gives descriptive and correlational statistical findings of the Grade Point Averages (GPAs) of the February 2010 and July 2009 TMSL First Time Texas Bar Test Takers to their TMSL Final GPA. Data was pre-existing and was given to the Evaluator by email from the Dean and Registrar. Statistical analyses were run using SPSS 17 to…

The following report of descriptive/inferential statistics describes the population of students receiving the Thurgood Marshall School of Law (TMSL) scholarship versus those who do not and their relationship with student Bar Passing rate and GPA. The timeline observed are the calendar years of 2005-2009. Data collection and analysis for this…

This longitudinal study focuses on a new generation. Members of the high school class of 2002 were born in the years 1983 and 1984. In order to situate their lives in historical context, it is helpful to think back to some of the major events in the lives of these young Illinois citizens. This analysis of the cohort of 2002 provides leaders of…

This paper reviews the literature on methods for dealing with missing data, discusses four commonly used methods, and illustrates these approaches with a small hypothetical data set. Most studies contain some missing data, and the reasons data are missing are many and varied. Four commonly used methods have been identified in the literature: (1)…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD's) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys, which take place every three years, have been designed to collect information about 15-year-old students in participating countries. PISA examines how well students are prepared to meet the challenges of the future,…

A table is presented that directly converts any known point biserial coefficient to the biserial coefficient, providing the largest proportion of the dichotomous variable is also known. (Author)

In 2001, Illinois began administering the ACT (American College Testing) test to all 11th graders in Illinois public schools as part of the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE). For the first time, ACT scores and background information were available for most public-school students who would be completing high school one year later, rather than…

A continuing project titled "Measuring Career Readiness in Elementary Education" had as its fourth-year goal constructing learning activities to coordinate with six subtest areas of the Career Education Readiness Test (CERT). The secondary goal was to continue the refinement of the CERT through the analysis of data gathered during the…