Millions of dollars and countless hours of effort have been invested by school leaders and other stakeholders worldwide seeking to increase students' enthusiasm toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics through educational robotics competitions. The largest of these competitions is the VEX Robotics Competition (VRC). Little research…

Quantitative decision making (management science, business statistics) textbooks rarely address data cleansing issues, rather, these textbooks come with neat, clean, well-formatted data sets for the student to perform analysis on. However, with a majority of the data analyst's time spent on gathering, cleaning, and pre-conditioning data, students…

A versatile experiment is described for the high school and college laboratory setting based on the synthesis of biobased polymers prepared from inexpensive, renewable, and nonhazardous chemicals. Combinations of readily available citric acid, glycerol, and tapioca root starch are used to prepare three polymeric materials with different observable…

Data--their collection, analysis and use--have always been part of education, used to inform policy, strategy, operations, resource allocation, and, in the past, teaching and learning. Recently, with the emergence of learning analytics, the collection, measurement, analysis and use of student data have become an increasingly important research…

This article examines young people's films to provide insights about language and literacy practices. It offers a heuristic for thinking about how to approach data that is collectively produced. It tries to make sense of new ways of knowing that locate the research in the field rather than in the academic domain. The authors develop a lens for…

This study investigates the impact of different modes and tailor-made response enhancing measures (TMREM)--such as bilingual interviewers with a shared ethnic background and translated questionnaires--on the measurement of substantive variables in surveys among minority ethnic groups in the Netherlands. It also provides insight into the ability to…

This article shows fundamental notions of one of the qualitative research methods, we refer to the hermeneutical phenomenology based on the theories of Van Manen, Raquel Ayala and Miguel Martínez. This approach leads to the description and interpretation of the essence of lived experiences, recognizes the meaning and importance in pedagogy,…

California needs better data on the state's education systems to uncover and remedy systemic, long-standing racial and socioeconomic inequities. To create more just institutions, students, families, policymakers, educators, and advocates need access to quality, disaggregated data that allows them to answer questions about how well the state's…

State longitudinal data systems can be a powerful tool to support student success and spur equity-minded improvement throughout state education systems, but state policymakers must ensure that students' information is safe and secure. In a case study looking at Louisiana's efforts to secure student data, this profile illuminates some of the…

Big international assessment organisations like Cambridge Assessment have long held considerable amounts of data. When text is produced digitally, we can do more with it. Surprisingly to many, there have been examples of automatic scoring of extended writing for around 20 years, though what works well in one context may not be applicable in all…

This article examines the concept of credible evidence in Extension evaluations with specific attention to the measures and measurement strategies used to collect and create data. Credibility depends on multiple factors, including data quality and methodological rigor, characteristics of the stakeholder audience, stakeholder beliefs about the…

In 2024, state legislators introduced hundreds of bills that would affect data collection, access, and use across early education, K-12, postsecondary, and the workforce. As in 2023, legislators continued to introduce and enact legislation governing cross-agency data systems. These policies are the most important step toward making statewide…

Purpose: This paper aims to provides a brief review of the dashboard literature, an account of the development of performance dashboards for field data collection at Westat, and more specifically for the first cycle of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). A brief concluding section offers suggestions for…

A new app, freely available for Windows computers, has been developed to simulate tuning of an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer, on the basis of optimization data collected using a sector-field instrument. The app allows students to adjust parameters, including the torch position, gas flows, radio-frequency power, and guard-electrode…

This article presents the use of the qualitative research method and the challenges that this form of research imposes along with the increasingly systematic reluctance experienced by doctoral students and their chairs. Increasingly, doctoral students are opting for the qualitative approach over that of the traditional quantitative methodology.…