Accountability policies imply much about high school teachers' abilities and willingness to use state assessment data to improve instruction. This study asked what teacher- and school-level variables best predict how frequently teachers use state assessment data and how much instructional benefit they derive from use of data. Research has…

Analysis of classroom use and utilization data provides essential information for strategic space planning. However, efforts to improve use and/or utilization metrics can be thwarted by ingrained cultural practices, campus politics, lack of understanding, failure to recognize the impact to programmatic needs, absence of a coordinated campus…

This study employed a college student sample to retrospectively assess the adequacy of the college-related attribute information they received when deciding to attend college. The assessment separately considered males and females in the study's information sufficiency-importance framework with resulting strategies. The results suggest that when…

The idea that teaching practices could be improved through better data systems has captured the imagination of policy makers, researchers and foundations. However, the concept of data use itself is so ill-defined as to suggest that it is more of a panacea than a coherent reform proposal. This paper examines the concept with an eye toward what we…

This work proposes an organizational framework for creating a community to share personal health record (PHR) information in the form of a Health Records Social Network (HRSN). The work builds upon existing social network community concepts as well as the existing Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) model used by the medical community and…

Higher education experts tout learning outcomes assessment as a vehicle for program improvement. To this end the authors share a rubric designed explicitly to evaluate the quality of assessment and how it leads to program improvement. The rubric contains six general assessment areas, which are further broken down into 14 elements. Embedded within…

In recent years researchers have found that people often collaborate during information seeking activities. Collaborative information seeking (CIS) is composed of multiple different activities like seeking, sharing, understanding, and using information together. However, most studies of CIS have focused on how people find and retrieve information…

Each and every day, educators collect and use data about students, staff, and schools. Some of these data originate in individual student and staff records that are confidential or otherwise sensitive. And even those data that are a matter of public record, such as aggregate school enrollment, need to be accessed, presented, and used in an…

The European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) realises that there is a steadily growing interest among students and all stakeholders of Higher Education and the public at large in accessing detailed and reliable information on the quality of individual study programmes, faculties and higher education institutions. ENQA…

Data can serve as a powerful tool to ensure equity for students: if educators examine data through the lens of social justice, they will reveal success stories and wounds. At the author's former school, Nipher Middle School in Saint Louis, Missouri, the wounds of previous data-driven decisions were real. Using a social justice lens to examine…

Credit scores have a profound impact on home purchasing power and mortgage pricing, yet little is known about how credit scores influence households' residential location decisions. This study estimates the effects of credit scores on residential sorting behavior using a novel mortgage industry data set combining household demographic, credit, and…

Federal legislation such as No Child Left Behind requires greater focus and attention on the part of schools and school districts not only to make school improvements, but also to meet rigorous accountability requirements such as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as determined by high student achievement guidelines. These requirements have compelled…

Co-teaching occurs when a special educator and a general education teacher teach together in an inclusive classroom. Co-teaching has been adopted across the United States as the solution to meet the legal mandates of No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act. These pieces of legislation require schools to have…

In 2006, six community and technical colleges in Washington State joined the innovative national reform initiative called Achieving the Dream (ATD). This report describes the progress each college made in implementing ATD's "culture of evidence" principles for institutional improvement, examines strategies implemented by the colleges to…

In the present study, an examination is conducted in three school districts of how data are used to improve classroom practice. In doing so, we explore the effects that attitudes toward data, principal leadership, and computer data systems have on how data are used to affect classroom practice. Findings indicate that educators are ambivalent about…