Background: UK government policy views collaboration with outstanding schools as a way of helping apparently less successful schools to close the attainment gap. However, there has been little debate about criteria for defining a school's success or failure. Moreover it is unclear which aspects of outstanding schools could readily transfer to…

Purpose: We explored the practices and understandings around using disaggregated data to inform instruction of 18 principals from three Midwestern school districts. Research Method: This qualitative study used one-on-one semistructured interviews with the principals focusing on how they disaggregate data in practice. The protocol included general…

Aim/Purpose: This study examines differences in credit and noncredit users' learning and usage of the Plant Sciences E-Library (PASSEL, http://passel.unl.edu), a large international, open-source multidisciplinary learning object repository. Background: Advances in online education are helping educators to meet the needs of formal academic credit…

With the advent of computers in education, and the ample availability of online learning and practice environments, enormous amounts of data on learning become available. The purpose of this paper is to present a decade of experience with analyzing and improving an online practice environment for math, which has thus far recorded over a billion…

Inquiry-oriented pedagogy is a difficult pedagogy to enact in the classroom. By placing students' questions and textual ideas at the center, the teacher opens the door to unanticipated and sometimes off-the-wall comments in text discussion. And yet, research has shown that it is exactly this type of pedagogy that leads to increased engagement and…

The establishment and use of nuclear power plants to meet the energy need is a controversial socioscientific issue in all the countries of the world; as in Turkey. In this regard, the current study intended to investigate the effect of the socioscientific issue-based instructional activities related to the Nuclear Energy Plants (NEP) that have…

Research has begun to show that certain schoolwide characteristics--such as student-centered learning environments, leadership, and safety--can be important for improving student outcomes. In keeping with these insights, school improvement efforts around the country are becoming less narrowly focused on the performance of individual students and…

Europe's knowledge economies need high-level skills, the capacity to innovate and to support democratic societies. In this perspective, the main objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relevance of higher education and how this is promoted in various countries in Europe and beyond. The evidence, conclusions and…

This book demonstrates teachers' and learners' experiences with big data in education; education and cloud computing; and new technologies for teacher support. It also discusses the advantages of using these frontier technologies in teaching and learning and predicts the future challenges. As such, it enables readers to better understand how…

Alternative school settings are success prospects for students at risk of school failure. However, research on the daily experiences of the special educators in alternate school settings tasked with educating the at-risk population, is limited. The purpose of this phenomenological study was (a) to recognize the perceptions of special educators…

The Big Lift is a collective impact initiative extending from preschool to third grade in San Mateo County, California. The collective impact effort consists of people and organizations from various sectors uniting to tackle a single, complicated societal problem -- in this case, third grade reading achievement. The initiative is a partnership of…

Under the Individual with Disabilities Education Act Part C state administrators have reported data for compliance since the inception of the program in 1986. Recently, Results Driven Accountability (RDA) introduced a shift to use data for continuous improvement at the state and local levels. The researcher used a multiple case study to…

There is overwhelming evidence that children's early years, from birth through preschool, are a crucial time for their development, and that high-quality early learning opportunities support children's school readiness, promote later life success, and yield a return of up to $7 for every $1 invested. Unfortunately, despite having the sixth-largest…

Systematic, practical, and accessible, this is the first book to focus on finding the most defensible design for a particular research question. Thoughtful guidelines are provided for weighing the advantages and disadvantages of various methods, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods designs. The book can be read sequentially or…

In my dissertation, I will present my research which contributes to solve the following three open problems from biomedical informatics: (1) Multi-task approaches for microarray classification; (2) Multi-label classification of gene and protein prediction from multi-source biological data; (3) Spatial scan for movement data. In microarray…