State and local report cards help ensure local educational agencies (LEAs), parents, families, educators, and communities have critical data and a common framework for gauging educational progress and success. Title I, Part A (Title I) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) requires States to annually share this important…

Members of the Data Science Program at George Washington University (GWU) designed and implemented a tuition-free two-week summer camp at GWU for high-school students from the Washington Metro Area. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of the Chief Information Officer and his staff were our main partners in the project. The…

Experts have heralded domain-specific play-based curricula coupled with regular coaching and training as our "strongest hope" for improving instructional quality in large-scale public preschool programs. Yet, details from different evaluations of the strongest hope model are not systematically compiled, making it difficult to identify…

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…

While designs of professional learning have expanded exponentially beyond the required-attendance inservice day workshop model, infusing meaningful data into daily decisions and conversations has not gained as much traction. Leaders of professional learning are increasingly coming under pressure to demonstrate that evidence is not an anathema in…

Higher education insiders trumpet the use of results for improvement as the most important part of the assessment cycle. Yet, at the same time, we acknowledge the rarity of improvement, especially at a program level. What are some reasons the most important phase of assessment occurs so infrequently? To seek answers, we investigated the "Use…

For decades, discussions regarding assessment have been taking place in higher education, which has forced institutions to take a look at outcomes and indicators of student achievement. Although the literature indicates an acceptance that assessment is not going away, the process that takes place within higher education institutions has led to…

The Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) has received an increasing number of questions from postsecondary educational institutions (institutions) on the conditions under which federal student financial aid information may be used for program evaluation and research purposes. Numerous federal laws govern access to, disclosure of, and use of…

For many districts, evaluation is an afterthought to implementing a new initiative. Educators participate in professional learning experiences, apply what they learn to their practice, and then, at some point, school and district staff begin wondering if the initiative is making a difference. Then they scramble for nuggets of data that provide any…

This timely book presents a data-driven approach to preventing and responding to school violence. As school violence receives increasing attention across the nation, the application of scientific knowledge is critical. For maximum effectiveness, transdisciplinary teams should use school data, logic models, and theories of change to design,…

Improving school climate takes time and commitment from a variety of people in a variety of roles. This document outlines key action steps that noninstructional staff--including guidance counselors, social workers, school psychologists, office staff, bus drivers, maintenance and facility staff, and food service staff--can take to support school…

In an effort to promote learning in classrooms, political science instructors are increasingly turning to interactive teaching strategies--experiments, simulations, etc.--that supplement traditional lecture formats. In this article, I advocate the use of student-generated data as a powerful teaching tool that can be used in a variety of ways to…

There are large gaps in educational access and attainment between the rich and poor in the United States. In 2016, there was a 25 percentage-point gap in college enrollment rates for high school graduates in the top and bottom family income quartiles. Reflections on Connecting Research and Practice in College Access and Success Programs is the…

The federal role in higher education has grown over the past two decades, and now a new administration has the opportunity to strengthen policies that support students and their colleges and universities. To help inform these decisions, the Urban Institute convened a bipartisan group of scholars and policy advisers to write a series of memos…

Background: There is worldwide interest in improving the effectiveness of teachers and teaching. This paper considers two strands of that interest. It revisits the impact of using enhanced feedback from teachers to pupils as a way of improving attainment, and it looks at the feasibility of teachers using research evidence to create their own…