Across the United States, there is an increased interest in improving school climate, reflecting a deepening understanding of the foundational role that school climate can play in supporting students' well-being, learning, and development. School climate is constructed from norms, expectations, and interpersonal relationships that come together to…

Recent methods have sought to improve precision in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by utilizing data from large observational datasets for covariate adjustment. For example, consider an RCT aimed at evaluating a new algebra curriculum, in which a few dozen schools are randomly assigned to treatment (new curriculum) or control (standard…

Teacher working conditions surveys provide biennial, comprehensive data regarding school leadership. This case describes how a Title I middle school principal proactively addresses end-of-year data to address identified needs and growth areas in a collaborative manner in her middle school. The principal works in a concerted manner with an…

The national Study of Education Data Systems and Decision Making documented the availability and features of education data systems and the prevalence and nature of data-informed decision making in districts and schools. That study, like past research, found that teachers' likelihood of using data in decision making is affected by how confident…

This article discusses the importance of mixed-methods research, in particular the value of qualitatively driven mixed-methods research for quantitatively driven domains like educational accountability. The article demonstrates the merits of qualitative thinking by describing a mixed-methods study that focuses on a middle school's system of…

Data literacy is recognized as a critically important skill in today's society, but thinking with and about data is often ignored in K-12 curricula. The Thinking With Data (TWD) project advocates that data literacy is a skill that should be addressed in an interdisciplinary manner. This article provides an overview of the TWD curriculum for middle…

This article discusses how the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) accountability mechanism of No Child Left Behind makes use of supposedly objective standardized test scores to describe schools in a certain way when the very same results could serve to draw very different conclusions. Examining the proficiency scores of students from a specific middle…

Addresses issues of students' understandings of representative values of data--how representative values should be introduced, and what role student understanding of representative values plays in their ability to analyze sets of data. Highlights the importance of teacher support of student development of conceptual understandings of multiple…

Introduces an activity designed to develop statistical concepts such as the distribution for a set of data, various interpretations of the mean for a set of data, the limitation of the mean for distinguishing distributions, variation in data, variation in data from the mean, and the MAD as a measure of variation in data from the mean. (ASK)

Many students have difficulties in interpreting position versus time graphs. Presents an activity involving calculator-based motion labs that allows students to bring these graphs to life by turning their own motion into a graph that can be analyzed, investigated, and interpreted in terms of how they actually moved. (ASK)

Presents an activity using national achievement data to involve students in a project on data collection and statistics while learning about their attitudes toward and beliefs about mathematics. This activity presents a good opportunity to talk about various interpretations of data and allows students to examine and discuss their attitudes about…

Presents different real-world mathematics activities on data display and data analysis with pie charts from different time periods. (ASK)

Attempts to develop a methodology for assessing the relationship between students' written text and their scientific thinking by investigating how one group of middle school students generated meanings for scientific data and expressed them in writing. Finds that many student reports contained a minimal number of written inferences, expressing…

Data analysis has become a topic of increasing emphasis within middle school mathematics in the last few years, especially in the recent recommendations by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM 2000). In order to better inform efforts to expand data analysis's role in middle school curricula, we have begun the development of a…

Through a layered analysis that reinterprets previous research experience with middle-schoolers, considers how being positioned researchers changes the interpretations or texts inscribed on their research interactions. Researchers create texts that unintentionally conceal the direction and nature of their "invasiveness." Conundrums abound in…