The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) is dedicated to helping everyone with a stake in education, including parents, teachers, education leaders, and policymakers, effectively and appropriately understand and use education data. DQC helps parents and educators understand the value of data--why data matter and how they can help students be successful in…

Better information about how investments in education are influencing outcomes for students, schools, and districts is needed. The growing hunger for using financial data to answer more and evolving questions will require changes in systems, policy, practice, and culture. The problem at hand is that both people and systems have limited capacity to…

This paper discusses how the process for IEP documentation was used in a training program for a group of young inexperienced teachers and teaching aides to effectively address the educational needs of children with diverse disabilities. Teachers at Kianh Centre in Vietnam received explicit instructions for writing effective functional individual…

For most of U.S. history, local communities were the primary arbiters of school quality. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, states began assuming more and more control over school standards and outcomes. The question we seek to answer is whether and the extent to which a particular kind of local voice--the voice of education practitioners--is…

In this exploratory study, the authors examine Greek special education teachers' individual and collaborative teaching experiences in the context of their literacy instruction. The Five Foci Framework, situated in Vygotskian theory, is utilized in the study's design to examine special education teachers' individual and collaborative experiences…

Recognizing the need for information in public education, Congress mandated in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that all states create and disseminate annual school performance report cards. A decade after NCLB passed, school report cards are widely available for nearly every school in the country. As the amount of school performance data…

Data-based decision making is all the rage. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (2009) has emphatically declared, "I am a deep believer in the power of data to drive our decisions. Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells us where we are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk." In the past few years, all 50 states have adopted most or…

All programs of healthcare education face increasing change and daunting challenges to prepare new graduates for the real world of practice as care providers in complex systems. The necessity for change in nursing education is at a critical level, called on from a variety of sources. New nurses must be able to enter practice as competent, safe,…

The focus of this study involves the perceptions held by enrollment managers at the American Jesuit Catholic colleges and universities of national rankings of colleges and universities and the strategic use of this information. Enrollment management emerged within colleges and universities in response to increasing competition for incoming…

In the case of higher education, the hills are more like mountains of data that "we're accumulating at a ferocious rate," according to Gerry McCartney, CIO of Purdue University (Indiana). "Every higher education institution has this data, but it just sits there like gold in the ground," complains McCartney. Big Data and the new tools people are…

Introduction: Evidence-based practice is a process through which evidence in its various forms is sourced, appraised and applied in order to solve a problem, inform decision making, or improve practice. The purpose of this paper is to share findings from a qualitative research study that sought to identify evidence used by Australian special…

This article examines an understudied aspect of teachers' sensemaking of student learning data: the way in which teachers explain the causes of the outcomes observed in data. Drawing on sensemaking and attribution theory and data collected in six middle schools, we find that while teachers most often attributed outcomes to their own instruction,…

The objective of this article is to describe the successes and challenges of a unique knowledge mobilization initiative that was funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This initiative focused on promoting knowledge mobilization by increasing the capacity of child welfare organizations in Ontario to conduct…

The nature of the information seeking behaviour of the teachers engaged in General Degree Colleges and Teachers' Training Colleges affiliated to West Bengal State University, India, is critically analysed in the present study. The descriptive analysis is based on well structured, close-ended questionnaires which were distributed among 450…

In spring 2013, the Washington Center administered a national survey to find what campuses assessed when they assessed their learning community programs, how they assessed those outcomes, and what they did with the results. Sixty-six campuses responded to the survey. Most campuses assess at least one measure of student success (pass rates, course…