For decades, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has enforced civil rights in our nation's preschool through 12th grade (P-12) and post-secondary schools, which now serve almost 80 million students annually. In Fiscal Year 2015, the OCR promoted excellence in education through conducting investigations and monitoring schools under resolution…

With many cities showing an interest in afterschool system building and research providing a growing body of useful information, this Wallace Perspective offers a digest of the latest thinking on how to build and sustain an afterschool system, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for this promising work. The report (a follow-up to a…

As state and local education agencies increasingly focus on serving educators with their data systems, a common challenge has arisen: identifying the critical knowledge, skills, and behaviors needed by teachers and administrators to use data effectively. Many states are creating data literacy and data use training programs for pre- and in-service…

This report describes in detail how researchers, policymakers, and program administrators can recognize opportunities for experiments and carry them out. Specifically, the report focuses on opportunistic experiments, defined as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that study the effects of initiatives, program changes, or policy actions that…

Data-mining systems provide a variety of opportunities for school district personnel to streamline operations and focus on student achievement. This article describes the value of data mining for school personnel, finance departments, teacher evaluations, and in the classroom. It suggests that much could be learned about district practices if one…

Efforts to develop common higher education data standards are expanding both within and across countries. The institutional research (IR) community plays a critical role in assuring that these efforts capture the diverse manifestations of the postsecondary and tertiary education systems and promote responsible comparisons. This chapter provides…

This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0 ; 8 and 3 ; 0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data…

This study was an exploration of the steps school leaders take when creating site-based professional support for school-based staff. The objective was to learn the steps taken by school leaders to implement job-embedded professional development practices and to identify the impact those steps had on the teachers, the students, and the school…

Interdisciplinary research in computer science requires the development of computational techniques for practical application in different domains. This usually requires careful integration of different areas of technical expertise. This dissertation presents image and time series analysis algorithms, with practical interdisciplinary applications…

Sociolinguists have made considerable headway in identifying and describing the relationship between mobility, linguistic resources, and forms of inequality. Despite such advances, however, we argue that it is as important as ever to continue to rethink what kinds of phenomena are analyzed, the distinctions and categories that might be imposed on…

YouTube users have access to the powerful data collection tool, Insight. Insight allows YouTube content producers to collect data about the number of online views, geographic location of viewers by country, the demographics of the viewers, how a video was discovered, and the attention span of the viewer while watching the video. This article…

By giving early adolescents in their last 2 years of primary/elementary schooling opportunities to voice their ideas, teacher educators, school leaders, and teachers gain insight into how children view their mathematics learning. This article explores the views and aspirations of 34 11- to 13-year-old students from a range of socioeconomic schools…

This article reports on the findings of a PhD research project into the improvisatory nature of teacher expertise. The data are taken from a series of comparative case studies of seven experienced teachers working in secondary schools in the South West of England and who have been identified as being expert within their school setting. Constant…

Most distance learning institutions collect vast amounts of learning data. Making sense of this 'Big Data' can be a challenge, in particular when data are stored at different data warehouses and require advanced statistical skills to interpret complex patterns of data. As a leading institute on learning analytics, the Open University UK instigated…

This study examined vocational/educational disruption in the 2-3 years after high school for 36 youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Data were collected three times from parents: during youth's last year of high school and two times after high school exit. Data were coded into categories indicating any versus no disruptions in postsecondary…