Determining whether a state's young people are on track for a life of opportunity is a difficult task for governors and state leaders. States can be both awash in data and unable to easily access and use that data to inform policy. State longitudinal data systems that meaningfully connect workforce, higher education, K-12, and early childhood…

Administrative data on employment and earnings, commonly referred to as wage data or wage records, can be used to assess the labor market outcomes of workforce, education, and other programs, providing policymakers, administrators, researchers, and the public with valuable information. However, there is no single readily accessible federal source…

This brief identifies the similarities and differences in the quality of education management information systems across the Federated States of Micronesia, which includes the four states of Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap. During focus group sessions that explored the methods and processes used to collect, analyze, report on, and disseminate…

All students deserve a great education, one that affords every opportunity for them to grow into knowledgeable and successful adults. To date, efforts to improve education have operated on a model of mass production, assuming--wrongly--that what works for some students must work for all. To change that model, students and their parents, teachers,…

Large quantities of data are now being generated, collated and processed within schools through computerised systems and other digital technologies. In response to growing concerns over the efficiency and equity of how these data are used, the concept of "open data" has emerged as a potential means of using digital technology to…

The objective of this commentary is to call attention to the feasibility and importance of large-scale, systematic, quantitative analysis in international and comparative education research. We contend that although many existing databases are under- or unutilized in quantitative international-comparative research, these resources present the…

This is a critical time to understand the benefits and risks of educational research using large data sets. Massive quantities of educational data can now be stored, analyzed, and shared. State longitudinal data systems can track individual students from pre-K through college and work. Districts and schools keep detailed data on individual…

This tool and its supporting resources are intended to help education leaders understand and assess equitable access data to support a root-cause analysis and, ultimately, draft a State Plan to Ensure Equitable Access to Excellent Educators. The activities in this tool introduce metrics, address staff capacity for analyzing equitable access data,…

NCES asked the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) to convene a technical panel of survey and policy experts to examine the NCES current and planned data dissemination strategies for confidential data with respect to: mandates and directives that NCES make data available; current and prospective technologies for protecting and…

This paper reports on progress to date with a project underway in New Zealand involving the extraction of data from multiple government agencies that is then combined into one comprehensive longitudinal integrated dataset and made available to trial participants in a way never previously thought possible. The dataset includes school leaver…

We propose a new limited-information goodness of fit test statistic C[subscript 2] for ordinal IRT models. The construction of the new statistic lies formally between the M[subscript 2] statistic of Maydeu-Olivares and Joe (2006), which utilizes first and second order marginal probabilities, and the M*[subscript 2] statistic of Cai and Hansen…

This article details the spread and scope of large-scale 1:1 computing initiatives around the world. What follows is a review of the existing literature around 1:1 programs followed by a description of the large-scale 1:1 database. Main findings include: 1) the XO and the Classmate PC dominate large-scale 1:1 initiatives; 2) if professional…

Access to geoscience data has been difficult for many educators. Understanding what educators want in terms of data has been equally difficult for scientists. From 2004 to 2009, we conducted annual workshops that brought together scientists, data providers, data analysis tool specialists, educators, and curriculum developers to better understand…

As federal government information is increasingly migrating to online formats, libraries are providing links to this content via URLs or persistent URLs (PURLs) in their online public access catalogs (OPACs). Clickthrough statistics that accumulated as users visited links to online content in the University of Denver's library OPAC were gathered…

There has been a significant increase in the use of secondary data sets. Many such data sets purport to be nationally representative. Secondary data sets include research commissioned by the National Center for Education Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control, and other public entities. Research increasingly utilizes these secondary data in…