Determining whether a state's young people are on track for a life of opportunity is a difficult task for governors and state leaders. States can be both awash in data and unable to easily access and use that data to inform policy. State longitudinal data systems that meaningfully connect workforce, higher education, K-12, and early childhood…

Governments, organizations, and companies are generating copious amounts of data and analysis to support education decision-making around the world. While continued investments in data creation and management are necessary, the ultimate value of information is not in its "production," but its "use." Herein lies one of the…

Over the last years, principals in schools have had to contend with numerous governmental regulations that change with each passing year. The change from instruction based on concepts to instruction based on standards to instruction based on student performance has created a need for principals to utilize data in ever-increasing forms. Both…

Federal education policy in recent years has encouraged state and local education agencies to embrace data use and analysis in decision-making, ranging from policy development and implementation to performance evaluation. The capacity of these agencies to make effective and methodologically sound use of collected data for these purposes remains an…

Clinical applications of statistical process control (SPC) in human service organizations are considered. SPC is seen as providing a standard set of criteria that serves as a common interface for data-based decision making, which may bring decision making under the control of established contingencies rather than the immediate contingencies of…

Indexing is a tool that can be used with longitudinal, quantitative data for analysis of relative changes and for comparisons of changes among items. For greater accuracy, raw financial data should be deflated into constant dollars prior to indexing. This paper demonstrates the procedures for indexing, statistical deflation, and the use of…

"EnrollForecast for Excel" will generate a 5-year forecast of K-12 student enrollment. It will also work for any combination of grades between kindergarten and twelth. The forecasts can be printed as either a table or a graph. The user must provide birth history (only if forecasting kindergarten) and enrollment history information. The user also…

The report describes research designed to improve personnel decisions which the Navy must make relative to the input and output of Officer Candidate School (OCS). Officers making the first decision consider all relevant applications data in deciding on men to be accepted and rejected for entry into OCS; those making the second determine the best…

Incorporating statistical process control (SPC) methods into applied behavior analysis is discussed. It is claimed that SPC methods would likely reduce applied behavior analysts' intimate contacts with problems and would likely yield poor treatment and research decisions. Cases and data presented by Pfadt and Wheeler (1995) are cited as examples.…

This document contains the appendices for the report prepared by an analysis group that quantitatively presented the status of vocational education and implications for the future. Appendixes A-F contain: (A) documentation supporting the discussion of the vocational education system, (B) documentation supporting the discussion of measuring…

Statistical process control (SPC), which employs simple statistical tools and problem-solving techniques such as histograms, control charts, flow charts, and Pareto charts to implement continual product improvement procedures, can be incorporated into human service organizations. Examples illustrate use of SPC procedures to analyze behavioral data…

The data system and its branches, computerized in 1970, provide information from the following: student records file, accountancy file, an experimental-stage personnel file, and a planning-stage facilities file. The files not only cope with the university's daily management duties but also supply the French Ministry with statistics. Two types of…

Seven potentially useful maxims from the field of human information processing are proposed that may help institutional researchers prepare and present information for higher education decision-makers. The maxims, which are based on research and theory about how people cognitively process information, are as follows: (1) more may not be better;…

In January 1998-March 2000, a new statistical assessment and referral system to improve the job retention of welfare recipients participating in welfare-to-work programs was piloted in the welfare-to-work program serving two counties in southwestern Michigan. The assessment and referral system is based on statistical methods and uses…

Decision makers have always relied on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative information. Recently, two technological tools--spreadsheets and the Internet--have dramatically altered how decision makers analyze quantitative information, thus necessitating curriculum changes in programs to prepare students to use these tools effectively. Harvard…