When the COVID-19 pandemic drove schools online in March 2020, state education leaders were left without access to data needed to understand how best to support students. The pandemic revealed the strengths and limitations of state education data systems while inspiring new strategies for collecting, reporting and using data. In 2021, DataSmith…

"Measure, Use, Improve! Data Use in Out-of-School Time" shares the experience and wisdom from a broad cross-section of out-of-school time professionals, ranging from internal evaluators, to funders, to researchers, to policy advocates. Key themes of the volume include building support for learning and evaluation within out-of-school time…

The rapid growth of the U.S. Latinx population has led to an increased need for community organizations and academic institutions to develop partnerships focused on addressing gaps in health maintenance and education of Latinx individuals. Medical schools also have a responsibility to educate future physicians in delivering culturally sensitive…

This report is the first in a series of annual reports the Michigan legislature mandated in December 2020. The purpose of this report is to summarize available state administrative data to begin to quantify the teacher shortage, provide a baseline from which future comprehensive data analysis can begin, and most critically, to provide…

This article traces the reconceptualization of a primarily co-curricular undergraduate enrichment program, from experienced-based to competency-based development. It argues that, rather than holding a central place in the program's curriculum, the concept of "deliberative democracy" that grounds the program is best understood as an…

REL Pacific at McREL, one of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), serves educators in American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap), Guam, Hawai'i, the Republic of the…

As part of the student success agenda, the nation's community colleges have been asked to rethink their approach to education on every level. From the explosion of smartphones and mobile devices on campus to the demand for more robust data analytics and tracking to the increasingly technical nature of global work, technology has evolved from a…

The purpose of this design case is to tell the story of our work to design context-aware activity notification for learning management systems. The story of the design experience is not simple, in that it includes research and development, conceptual evolution, implementation and extinction, and multiple phases, including inspiration for future…

Throughout the 1990s, Richard Reid of Michigan State University maintained a list showing the first programming language used in introductory programming courses taken by computer science and information systems majors; it was updated for several years afterwards by Frances Van Scoy of West Virginia University. However, it has been 5 years since…

This study describes a well-defined data-driven diagnostic identification and selection procedure for choosing students at-risk of academic failure for appropriate academic support services. This algorithmic procedure has been validated both by historical quantitative studies of student precedents and outcomes as well as by current qualitative…

The task of managing an IT system in a school environment poses unique challenges. For example, one of the greatest challenges facing individual schools is the lack of integration between various information systems. The present situation in many schools is that there are many disconnected systems managing many different tasks. Systems with…

In 2007, Michigan undertook a bold mission: to retrain tens of thousands of adults to qualify for jobs in emerging and expanding sectors of the economy. The state's proposal to jobless, dislocated, and low-income residents was simple but appealing: enroll in up to two years of postsecondary education, and Michigan would cover up to $5,000 in…

This paper briefly describes and gives examples of how one teacher education program developed and has been successfully using a web based system to effectively and efficiently place student teachers, maintain records of placement information, communicate with schools, determine honoraria requests and obtain evaluation data from student teachers…

In 1991, Michigan's Technical Planning Subgroup of the Resource Group on National Education Goal 2 (high school completion) recommended the development of a voluntary state/local student record system and compilation of a compendium of current state practices and current plans for state/local system development. Governor Carroll Campbell, Jr.…

Educational improvement through data-based decision-making using high-quality data is a longstanding goal of policymakers and practitioners, and ensuring the quality of the evidence available to inform such decisions is a key part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The evidence-based education that such initiatives promote involves the…