Educational apps can help children develop their early numeracy skills, but only if they incorporate certain pedagogical features. AppLINOU is an early numeracy app that was co-designed by a multidisciplinary team to be compatible with the way numeracy is taught in France's preschools. This study of whether incorporating AppLINOU into classroom…

Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to gain insights and understandings of high school teachers' perceptions and use of formative assessment to enhance their planning, individualization of instruction, and adjustment of course content to improve student learning. The study was conducted over two years in a midwestern high school of…

With abundant access to assessments of all kinds, many high school chemistry teachers have the opportunity to gather data from their students on a daily basis. This data can serve multiple purposes, such as informing teachers of students' content difficulties and guiding instruction in a process of data-driven inquiry. In this paper, 83 resources…

Early childhood educators are increasingly asked to support the alphabet knowledge development of children enrolled in their classrooms. Children in the same classroom, however, often show vastly different alphabet learning needs. Moreover, recent research suggests that some letters are more difficult to learn. These facts run counter to…

Many teachers in higher education use feedback from students to evaluate their teaching, but only some use these evaluations to improve their teaching. One important factor that makes the difference is the teacher's approach to their evaluations. In this article, we identify some useful approaches for improving teaching. We conducted focus groups…

Two well-accepted ideas among educators are (a) performance assessment is an effective means of assessing higher-order thinking skills and (b) data-driven instruction planning is a valuable tool for optimizing student learning. This article describes a locally developed performance task (LDPT) designed to measure critical thinking, problem…

This article presents the findings of a recent survey of natural resource webinar providers. Respondents were asked a range of questions regarding their webinar services. Findings showed that respondents most commonly marketed their webinars through email or websites and targeted an audience of professionals. Respondents noted that the greatest…

What data should teachers use, and how should they use these data to improve their teaching? In this review, a diverse set of literature that addresses this question is categorized according to three distinct approaches: the diagnostic approach, the methods approach, and the teacher approach. Within the diagnostic approach, teachers collect data…

"Curricula-in-action" generally differ from "official" curricula. That is particularly true of clerkship curricula because the practising doctors who supervise medical students' clinical activities are only secondarily educators. Clerkship education is evaluated, however, according to benchmarks set by official curricula.…

This case study uses evidence collected for accreditation and programme improvement at a small university Master's and certification programme in Educational Leadership Development to describe efforts to help leadership candidates use data during the programme's final internship experience. Programme features supporting the growth of candidates'…

There is an increasing emphasis on evidence-based education, and the sciences of learning are progressing rapidly. But are reports, guidelines, and outreach enough to disseminate this knowledge and affect educational practice? In fact, policy makers and the public often resist evidence-based recommendations about education. This article suggests…

The role of data analysis in the jobs of instructional leaders has become as commonplace as teachers creating lesson plans and taking roll in the classroom. Teachers and building leaders routinely use interim assessment data to develop thoughtful and robust instructional plans that address identified areas of student need. The link between the…

Schools and districts are inundated with data from a variety of sources. As a result, using data to guide instructional planning can be daunting for teachers and schools. While schools and districts are dealing with shrinking budgets and growing demands for high student achievement, an investment in school-based coaching can provide exponential…

The term "data-based decision making" (DBDM) has become pervasive in education and typically refers to the use of data to make decisions in schools, from assessment of an individual student's academic progress to whole-school reform efforts. Research suggests that special education teachers who use progress monitoring data (a DBDM…