Increasing numbers of states have incorporated measures of students' academic growth into their data and accountability policies. Measuring growth is a statistically complicated task and complex growth measures can be easy to misinterpret. This paper reports on a survey of 317 Massachusetts principals' understanding of the Student Growth…

Informal learning and how individuals learn in the workplace have gained increasing attention by researchers in recent years. In relation to other learning activities, informal learning constitutes a substantial part of an adult's life. This paper explores the informal workplace learning experiences of graduate student employees. Data was…

Research on problem solving typically does not address tasks that involve following detailed and/or illustrated step-by-step instructions. Such tasks are not seen as cognitively challenging problems to be solved. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by analyzing verbal protocols collected during an Origami folding task. Participants…

As district- and school-level leaders face increasing pressure from federal, state, and local accountability mandates there has been increased dependence on using and analyzing student data to help improve student performance. While the reporting of disaggregated data by student subgroup confirms that achievement gaps exist, it does not provide…

Data-mined models often achieve good predictive power, but sometimes at the cost of interpretability. We investigate here if selecting features to increase a model's construct validity and interpretability also can improve the model's ability to predict the desired constructs. We do this by taking existing models and reducing the feature set to…

Examining data provides a unique opportunity to have students work actively with various technologies, such as computers or graphing calculators. Students can import data into spreadsheet software, execute mathematical calculations, create data graphs, and use this material in reports to present the results of their inquiry. Reinforcing the use of…

The report describes activities and findings of an 18-month project which surveyed day and other non-residential services provided to persons with mental retardation in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. An introductory section describes project purposes, followed by a description of project methods (sampling plan, questionnaire development,…

This book traces the development of competitive admission and financial aid policies at a selected group of 16 liberal arts colleges in Ohio and Massachusetts over the period 1955 to 1994. Exploring the way institutional decisions reflect and respond to broad demographic, economic, political, and social forces, the book considers the challenges…