Practical work involving laboratory experiments is agreed upon to be an essential component of secondary science education. Practical work encompasses a broad range of activity types. The different forms of practical work are not equal in terms of cognitive demand and learning benefit. Inquiry-based investigations provide experience of cognitive…

This paper seeks to empirically validate a sector agonistic instrument that measures the perceived critical success factors in data governance. Twelve constructs (Leadership and Management Commitment; Leadership and Management Alignment; Executive Sponsorship; Robust Data Governance Strategy; Change Management; Training and Education; Governance…

All chemistry students must develop competency in analyzing and making sense of data. However, there are many difficulties that chemistry students may experience while analyzing data. Many students may not use relevant prior knowledge to aid in making sense of data, or they may not form conclusions using all the data provided. Additionally, prior…

There has been a great deal of news, discussion, and outcry regarding the lack of diversity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) related fields, be it industry or academia. On many comparative lists regarding STEM students and workers, African American males are an unacceptably low percentage of the population. The problem is quite…

Teacher turnover continues to be a significant problem in the United States. Teacher turnover is expensive because it costs money to continue recruiting, hiring, and training new teachers to replace those leaving (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). Most important though, teacher turnover hurts student achievement and success (Sorensen…

Performance-based funding policies for postsecondary institutions have been enacted throughout the United States as an answer to reductions in public funding and increased accountability mandates. Institutional effectiveness, as demonstrated through metrics such as graduation and retention rates, dictates the level of funding received. Educational…

Digital learning environments are becoming increasingly ubiquitous as a wide range of EdTech products and services enter classrooms and households across the globe. One salient attribute of these environments is their capacity to generate large amounts of data as students interact with the technology. These data logs can help construct a detailed…

Many departments seek to improve their equity, diversity, and inclusion using data-informed methods; however, not much is known about how closely department leadership aligns their review practices with appropriate theory. This dissertation seeks to explore four areas: 1) how are equity, diversity, and inclusion are being conceptualized (implied…

A problem exists in NC Montessori schools with effective data analysis for specific learning disabilities (SLD) placement. The purpose of this study was to identify administrators' and teachers' perceptions of data collection and analysis within multitiered systems of support (MTSS) in a Montessori school. Fixsen's implementation science theory…

In this work, we introduce a novel oversampling technique, the theory of inheritance and Gower distance-based oversampling (TIGO) method, designed to address class imbalance issues in mixed categorical and continuous variables data set. Drawing inspiration from genetic inheritance principles, TIGO synthesizes new minority class data,…

This action research study examined how faculty development workshops affected how testing grade level teachers disaggregate standardized data. It also examined how teachers used the information to improve communication and classroom instruction. The rationale for the study was that teachers were asked to be data driven, but were not taught how to…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to provide school district leaders and policymakers information of the impact grade configuration had on academic performance using math and ELA ILEARN scores over a three-year period. The study included data from 585 schools that were classified into four groups: Elementary Setting, Intermediate Setting,…

This dissertation was prepared to determine if a correlation existed between a student's poverty level and an educational diagnosis of serious emotional disturbance. I hypothesize that students at or under the United States' definition of poverty are more likely to exhibit signs and symptoms of a serious emotional disturbance and therefore be…

Multivariate Functional Principal Component Analysis (MFPCA) is a valuable tool for exploring relationships and identifying shared patterns of variation in multivariate functional data. However, interpreting these functional principal components (PCs) can sometimes be challenging due to issues such as roughness and sparsity. In this dissertation,…

The last decades have seen an unprecedented growth in the availability and accessibility of data, highly influenced by the ubiquity of digital media and the internet. As society contends with data's increasing impact on the nature of knowledge, communication, and privacy, it faces a pressing need for citizens who are intelligent producers and…