Today's citizens are expected to use evidence, frequently presented in the media, to inform decisions about health, behavior, and public policy. However, science misinformation is ubiquitous in the media, making it difficult to apply research appropriately. Across two experiments, we addressed how anecdotes and prior beliefs impact readers'…

Today's citizens are expected to use evidence, frequently presented in the media, to inform decisions about health, behavior, and public policy. However, science misinformation is ubiquitous in the media, making it difficult to apply research appropriately. Across two experiments, we addressed how anecdotes and prior beliefs impact readers'…

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the nonpartisan research and analytical arm of the U.S. Congress and is physically and structurally located within the Library of Congress. Despite the role of CRS as a critical information provider and technical assistant to actors crafting and implementing federal policy, CRS reports, which serve as a…

Big Data refers to large and disparate volumes of data generated by people, applications and machines. It is gaining increasing attention from a variety of domains, including education. What are the challenges of engaging with Big Data research in education? This paper identifies a wide range of critical issues that researchers need to consider…

While the use of inferential statistics is a nearly universal practice in the social sciences, there are instances where its application is unnecessary and potentially misleading. This is true for a portion of research using administrative data in educational research in the United States. Surveying all research articles using administrative data…

This article describes a project undertaken as part of a cross-campus strategic planning effort. The project documented current campus practices and systems in use for collecting, analyzing and reporting key research metrics. The project identified organizational issues around siloed data collection and lack of clarity on data stewards, data…

The process of using information about documents such as the author, genre, and date of publication while evaluating and interpreting those documents' content was labeled "sourcing" in a seminal paper by Wineburg ("Journal of Educational Psychology," "83," "73," 1991). Studies in various domains have adapted…

Knowledge translation (KT) provides a lens to examine the process of moving research-informed knowledge into early intervention practice (P. Sudsawad, 2007). The process of KT entails cognitive, affective, and behavioral stages that are mediated by factors intrinsic and extrinsic to the practitioner. Facilitators and barriers to this process may…

The ability of a scientific discipline to build cumulative knowledge depends on its predominant method of data analysis. A steady accumulation of knowledge requires approaches which allow researchers to consider results from comparable prior research. Bayesian statistics is especially relevant for establishing a cumulative scientific discipline,…

Despite abundant data and increasing data availability brought by technological advances, there has been very limited education policy studies that have capitalized on big data--characterized by large volume, wide variety, and high velocity. Drawing on the recent progress of using big data in public policy and computational social science…

There is growing pressure to make efficacy experiments more useful. This requires attending to the twin goals of generalizing experimental results to those schools that will use the results and testing the intervention's theory of action. We show how electronic records, created naturally during the daily operation of technology-based…

Americans share an expectation that government will serve the common good, creating inescapable pressure for public agencies--especially those that serve young children--to perform well. Yet education and human services agencies continually struggle to respond to the complex conditions in which children are born. How can they address the practical…

"Big data" prompts a whole lexicon of terms--data flow; analytics; data mining; data science; smart you name it (cars, houses, cities, wearables, etc.); algorithms; learning analytics; predictive analytics; data aggregation; data dashboards; digital tracks; and big data brokers. New terms are being coined frequently. Are we paying…

Thanks to extraordinary and exponential improvements in data storage and computing capacities, it is now possible to collect, manage, and analyze data in magnitudes and in manners that would have been inconceivable just a short time ago. As the world has developed this remarkable capacity to store and analyze data, so have the world's governments…

The increasing availability of digital data in higher education provides an extraordinary resource for researchers to undertake educational research, targeted at understanding challenges facing the sector. Big data can stimulate new ways to transform processes relating to learning and teaching, and helps identify useful data, sources of evidence…