Educational technologists may advance the state of the field by increasing capacity to develop software tools and instructional applications. Presently, few academic programs in educational technology require even a single computer programming course. Further, the educational technologists who develop software generally work independently or in…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of missing physical activity (PA) data of children and youth. Method: PA data from the Chinese City Children and Youth Physical Activity Study ("N" = 2,758; 1,438 boys and 1,320 girls; aged 9-17 years old) were used for the study. After the data were sorted by the…

The Bloomington Project School (BPS) is a charter school that has successfully adopted and implemented several learner-centered educational strategies. This case study offers a glimpse into its student-centered, collaborative, and interdisciplinary learning and teaching processes; its mastery-based assessment process; and its successful technology…

This article ethnographically examines the ways in which No Child Left Behind (NCLB) links local practices to the centralized processing of data through its narrowing of procedures and measurements aimed at accountability. Framed by actor-network theory, it draws upon data consistently collected between June 2005 and October 2008, and then…

Identifying effective tutorial dialogue strategies is a key issue for intelligent tutoring systems research. Human-human tutoring offers a valuable model for identifying effective tutorial strategies, but extracting them is a challenge because of the richness of human dialogue. This article addresses that challenge through a machine learning…

The study presents a phenomenologically based research procedure, whose intent is to examine people's school experience and the meaning they ascribe to "school." Participants in this investigative endeavor are instructed to sketch an "ideal school," present their plan in a visual-schematic manner, and provide an oral and written description of…

The use of data mining for the analysis of data collected in natural settings is increasingly recognized as a legitimate mode of enquiry. This rule-inductive paradigm is an effective means of discovering relationships within large datasets--especially in research that has limited experimental design--and for the subsequent formulation of…

The Hint Factory is an implementation of our novel method to automatically generate hints using past student data for a logic tutor. One disadvantage of the Hint Factory is the time needed to gather enough data on new problems in order to provide hints. In this paper we describe the use of expert sample solutions to "seed" the hint generation…

Despite all the speeches, articles, and meetings about data-based instructional decision making, the author's observation after more than 20 years of working with middle and high school teams is that teachers and administrators often make important instructional decisions on the basis of historical precedent, anecdotal information, experience, or…

Increasing rates of childhood obesity has prompted calls for comprehensive approaches to school-based physical activity (PA). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of comprehensive school physical activity program (CSPAP) development and related contextual issues within a rural Appalachian county using a Systems Approach. A…

This article presents key steps in the design and analysis of a computer based problem-solving assessment featuring interactive tasks. The purpose of the assessment is to support targeted instruction for students by diagnosing strengths and weaknesses at different stages of problem-solving. The first focus of this article is the task piloting…

Although institutional researchers devote a great deal of time mining and using student data to fulfill mandatory federal and state reports and analyze institutional effectiveness, financial and personnel information is also necessary for such endeavors. In this article, the authors discuss the challenges that arise from extracting data from…

As course management systems (CMS) gain popularity in facilitating teaching. A forum is a key component to facilitate the interactions among students and teachers. Content analysis is the most popular way to study a discussion forum. But content analysis is a human labor intensity process; for example, the coding process relies heavily on manual…

In this article, John Forbes, administrative analyst for the 80,000-student Fresno Unified School District in Fresno, and Terrence Young, chief information officer for the 70,000-student Guilford Country Schools in Greensboro, North Carolina, share their strategies for getting staff on board with Web-based data systems. These are the strategies:…