Robust indicators are important for identifying disadvantaged pupils in education, and for ensuring that they are rightly receiving relevant state-funded assistance. This paper compares the quality and completeness of data from England on student eligibility for free school meals (FSM) based on an administrative census, with more all-encompassing…

While the use of inferential statistics is a nearly universal practice in the social sciences, there are instances where its application is unnecessary and potentially misleading. This is true for a portion of research using administrative data in educational research in the United States. Surveying all research articles using administrative data…

Little attention has been paid to the processes that are involved in making sense of the role dissonance between sources of data has played in the development of theoretical insight. This methodologically oriented investigation considers an unusual set of case exemplars that used mixed methods and dialogic forms of mixing in ways that produced…

This paper analyses how three European countries produce and use data within a specific educational policy field, that of school leaving and graduation. It compares how stakeholders in England, Finland and the Netherlands know what happens to the leavers from schools and universities. Through gathering evidence about the methodological…

Forced-choice ipsative data are common in personality, philosophy and other preference-based studies. However, this type of data inherently contains dependencies that are challenging for usual statistical analysis. In order to utilize the structure of the data as a guide for analysis rather than as a challenge to manage, a visualisation tool was…

This paper explores how factors operating at the state and community levels are associated with the prevalence of late school enrolment in Nigeria. We investigate the following three research themes. First, whether late entry varies across states and across communities and how much of this variation can be explained by the composition of…

Mathematics competency is fast becoming an essential requirement in ever greater parts of day-to-day work and life. Thus, creating strategies for improving mathematics learning in students is a major goal of education research. However, doing so requires an ability to look at many aspects of mathematics learning, such as demographics and…