Encouraging teachers to reflect on their instructional practices and course design has been shown to be an effective means of improving instruction and student learning. However, the process of encouraging reflection is difficult; reflection requires quality data, thoughtful analysis, and contextualized interpretation. Because of this, research on…

Data-informed decision-making in teachers' practice, now recommended by different teacher inquiry models and policy documents, implies deep practice change for many teachers. However, not much is known about how teachers perceive the different steps that analytics-informed teacher inquiry entails. This paper presents the results of a study into…

Connecting teachers' perspectives with their practice is an enduring challenge shaping what and how we understand teaching. Researchers tend to bifurcate teachers' work between their private and their public lives. These "worlds" bring particular meanings that are rendered through the analyses of visual documentations of teaching and…

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the dynamic process involved in developing and utilizing a theoretical model in a mixed methods study. Specifically, I illustrate how the theoretical model can serve as the starting point in framing the study, as a lens for guiding the data collection and analysis, and as the end point in explaining the…

In the 21st century, the term "critical" has attached itself to numerous aspects of literacy research. However, what critical means remains commonly anchored to Freire and a primary critical reading practice--suspicious critique. Expanding critical literacy research (CLR), this article advances "reading orientations" as a…

Purpose: The general goal of this paper is to help educators understand the importance of MOOC training to school teachers and their hypothetical value for predicting the use of teaching strategies in the face-to face-classroom teaching. With this purpose, the study is guided by two research questions: (1) Are there different patterns of…

Governments and educational authorities around the world are emphasizing performance evaluation of educational systems. Opinion Mining (OM) has gained acceptance among experts in various regions, including the preparation space. The proposed model involves Two modules: the data preprocessing module and the opinion mining module. The main objective…

Due to educational policy, data use in schools is a widespread method of school improvement, yet results remain inconsistent. Across the literature, the school leader is a key determinant of the effectiveness of data use. This study sought to shed light on the role of the school leader in data use through a mixed methods case study. The study…

Monitoring academic progress to guide instructional practices is an important role of teachers in a small rural school district in the Southern United States. Teachers in this region were experiencing difficulties using the approved school district model to implement data-driven instruction. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to…

Researchers in many disciplines work with ranking data. This data type is unique in that it is often deterministic in nature (the ranks of items "k"-1 determine the rank of item "k"), and the difference in a pair of rank scores separated by "k" units is equivalent regardless of the actual values of the two ranks in…

Decades of research suggest that faculty play a critical role in student learning and success, yet at many institutions, faculty are not integrated into the institutional research function. This chapter examines how institutional research and faculty can collaborate to encourage data-informed faculty decision-making to drive student success and…

Today's schools emphasize the use of student data to make instructional decisions. Standardized tests determine funding and teacher advancement (Datnow, Park, & Wholstetter, 2007; Gullo, 2013; Marchant & Paulson, 2009; Schraw, 2010). To evaluate learning before these tests, teachers must utilize their own assessments and data. Formative…

This article studies the relationship between teachers' perceptions of distributive leadership and inquiry-based work in primary schools and the resulting impact on those teachers' capacity to contribute to educational change. The path analysis that tests the proposed model relies on questionnaire data collected from 787 teachers in 65 primary…

Due to poor student success rates in developmental mathematics, many institutions have implemented various forms of redesign into their developmental math curricula. Since the goal of redesign is to increase student success, it is salient to explore all aspects of the redesign process. Many studies have focused on the positive outcomes of redesign…

The schools in the United States undergo reforms that involve the integration of data-intensive improvement process known as strategic improvement plans (SIPs). This process requires digital systems to set goals, create interventions, use and analyse student data, monitor and report SIPs. A challenge with digital systems is the integration of a…