School inspections are a common feature of many education systems. These may be informed by quantitative background data about schools. It is recognised that there are pros and cons of using such quantitative information as part of the inspection process, though these have rarely been succinctly set out. This paper seeks to fill this gap by…

This chapter asserts that data are more likely to improve learning when assessment focuses on sensemaking conversations among students, faculty, and student affairs administrators, rather than on advanced statistical techniques.

School-based evaluations of interventions are increasingly common in education research. Ideally, the results of these evaluations are used to make evidence-based policy decisions for students. However, it is difficult to make generalizations from these evaluations because the types of schools included in the studies are typically not selected…

The Success By 6® (SB6) initiative is designed to support early care and education centers in improving and sustaining quality in Pennsylvania's Keystone STARS Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS). The SB6 evaluation report examines implementation and outcomes. The findings have implications for SB6 continous quality improvement process…

Data-driven decision making is part of our everyday lives. For example, we examine our children's immunization charts in order to indicate what vaccinations they have received, as well as what vaccinations are missing and expired. We use information, like a chart, to make decisions about what to do and what not to do. Data-driven decision making…

This study adopted a quantitative methodology involving a matched sample of federated and non-federated schools and utilising multilevel modelling techniques to explore the impact of federations on student outcomes. The sample involves a total of 50 school districts and 264 schools. These are grouped into 122 federations; 264 comparator schools…

Although data-based decision making can lead to improved student achievement, data are often not used effectively in schools. This paper therefore focuses on conditions for effective data use. We studied the extent to which school organizational characteristics, data characteristics, user characteristics, and collaboration influenced data use for…

Entrepreneurial leadership, as a distinctive type of leadership required for dealing with challenges and crises of current organizational settings, has increasingly been applied to improve school performance. However, there is limited research on the impact of school leaders' entrepreneurial leadership practices on school innovativeness. The main…

Education systems are increasingly creating rich, longitudinal data sets with frequent, and even real-time, data updates of many student measures, including daily attendance, homework submissions, and exam scores. These data sets provide an opportunity for district and school staff members to move beyond an indicators-based approach and instead…

For more than a decade, hundreds of thousands of India's young adults have volunteered to collect data for an annual household education related survey. The survey is called the Annual Status of Education Report or ASER, for short. The ASER survey is a unique methodology of citizen-led assessments. The purpose of this article is to describe and…

Using a quantitative study the researchers examined perceptions regarding school climate of parents with children who attend urban schools, based on several dimensions: quality of the instructional program, support for learning, school climate/environment for learning, parent/school relationships, and resource management. Of the 150 administered…

The field of education technology is embracing a use of learning analytics to improve student experiences of learning. Along with exponential growth in this area is an increasing concern of the interpretability of the analytics from the student experience and what they can tell us about learning. This study offers a way to address some of the…

The purpose of this study was to research both imperially validated and conceptualized school board best practices, as well as their utilization within Missouri school districts from differing geographic regions, with differing total school populations and differing level of school success. School success for this study was defined as district…

This dissertation examines the levels of and relationships between technical leadership, adaptive leadership, and defined autonomy among Denver school leaders along with their combined effects on school growth gains over time. Thirty principals provided complete responses to an online survey that included existing scales for technical leadership,…

Recent reform initiatives, such as the Title I School Improvement Grants and Race to the Top, recommended a principal change to jump-start school turnaround. Yet, few educational researchers have examined principal change as way to improve schools in a state of systematic reform; furthermore, no large-scale quantitative study has determined the…