The Afterschool Alliance, in partnership with MetLife Foundation, is proud to present the final issue brief in their latest series of four issue briefs examining critical issues facing middle school youth and the vital role afterschool programs play in addressing these issues. This brief explores afterschool and data utilization to improve…

As educators are increasingly called on to use data to inform improvement initiatives (and are being held accountable for doing so), there is a corresponding need for program leaders to monitor progress. Program monitoring--the systematic and continual observation and recording of key program aspects--can provide leaders with realistic assessments…

Listening closely to what students say about their school experiences can be beneficial to educators for understanding and addressing school-related topics and problems and rethinking policies and practices. The purpose of this toolkit is to provide educators with a purposeful and systematic way to elicit and listen to student voice to inform…

Improving the college search process by making college costs more transparent to potential students and their families has been a primary focus of recent higher education policy efforts. But the importance of this information does not end at the university gates. In order to make prudent decisions about what to study, how many courses to take, and…

In this article, we present a data set and case study exercise that can be used by educators to teach a range of statistical concepts including Simpson's paradox. The data set and case study are based on a real-life scenario where there was a claim of discrimination based on ethnicity. The exercise highlights the importance of performing rigorous…

This article describes an exciting exploration-based activity in which students develop an alternative definition of factor that can help them solve problems like the one presented above. Students work in groups to collect data, analyze the data to make conjectures, and then spend a significant amount of time debating and justifying their…

Purpose: It is a very prominent problem that Chinese universities lack school-running characteristics. In the past ten years, because of undergraduate teaching assessment requirements of the Ministry of Education, universities attach great importance to school-running characteristics. What is the reality and how to improve the effectiveness of…

Educational data mining can miss or misidentify key findings about student learning without a transparent process of analyzing the data. This paper describes the first steps in the process of using low-level logging data to understand how middle school students used Alice, an initial programming environment. We describe the steps that were…

The purpose of this study was to determine trends in the subject areas, methods, data collection tools, data analysis methods, and sample types used in recent studies on Turkish education, published in journals from 2000-2011. A total of 558 articles from 44 journals were selected from databases by the purposive sampling method and examined using…

Learning analytics is receiving increased attention, in part because it offers to assist educational institutions in increasing student retention, improving student success, and easing the burden of accountability. Although these large-scale issues are worthy of consideration, faculty might also be interested in how they can use learning analytics…

A meta-synthesis study was conducted of 60 research studies on educational data mining (EDM) and their impacts on and outcomes for improving learning outcomes. After an overview, an examination of these outcomes is provided (Romero, Ventura, Espejo, & Hervas, 2008; Romero, "et al.", 2011). Then, a review of other EDM-related research…

The paper critically assesses the more turbulent period in agri-food since 2007- by applying a transitions perspective to a range of empirical data collected from key private and public stakeholders in the UK during that period. It argues that increased volatility and a series of interdependent landscape pressures on the dominant agri-food regime…

In Fall 2011, staff at the University of Minnesota Libraries-Twin Cities undertook a project to measure how often, and in what ways, students used the Libraries' services. Partnering with the University's Office of Institutional Research, the team investigated ways to match library service usage to individual accounts while retaining patron…

In the book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game," author Michael Lewis describes how the Oakland Athletics, one of the poorest teams in Major League Baseball, became one of the most successful teams by using simple analytical methods that had existed for years but had been largely ignored by the baseball executives. "Moneyball"…

This article analyzes the research of 205 doctoral dissertations and masters' theses in the domain of blended learning. A summary of trends regarding the growth and context of blended learning research is presented. Methodological trends are described in terms of qualitative, inferential statistics, descriptive statistics, and combined approaches…