High-volume, high-quality and diverse datasets are crucial for advancing research in the education field. However, such datasets often contain sensitive information that poses significant privacy challenges. Traditional anonymisation techniques fail to meet the privacy standards required by regulations like GDPR, prompting the need for more robust…

Students, families, colleges, and lawmakers need clearer information on postsecondary outcomes to make informed decisions. By leveraging data available at institutions and federal agencies, a nationwide student-level data network (SLDN) would close information gaps that persist in our higher education landscape to answer critical questions about…

In 2024, state legislators introduced hundreds of bills that would affect data collection, access, and use across early education, K-12, postsecondary, and the workforce. As in 2023, legislators continued to introduce and enact legislation governing cross-agency data systems. These policies are the most important step toward making statewide…

When the COVID-19 pandemic drove schools online in March 2020, state education leaders were left without access to data needed to understand how best to support students. The pandemic revealed the strengths and limitations of state education data systems while inspiring new strategies for collecting, reporting and using data. In 2021, DataSmith…

Developing tools to support students, educators, intuitions, and government in the educational environment has become an important task to improve the quality of education and learning outcomes. Information and communication technology (ICT) is adopted by educational institutions; one such instance is video interaction in flipped teaching.…

Data are an essential factor in the fourth industrial revolution, demanding engineers and scientists to leverage and analyze their potential for significantly improving the efficiency of industrial processes and their control systems. In classical industrial process control systems, the models are constructed using linear data-driven approaches,…

The statewide longitudinal data system (SLDS) Survey was first administered in the summer of 2017. This annual survey was created to help inventory the current data capacity of states' and territories' SLDSs. It not only focuses on whether a given data type or use is in place, but also explores the development of these data systems and their…

Information security and information privacy, while related, encompass different details, especially for higher education institutions. Data security, focused on protecting data from malicious attacks, does not go as far as data privacy, focused on how data is shared, used, and communicated with others. Prior literature and research suggest higher…

A strong, well-aligned data system allows State CTE [Career Technical Education] Directors and other state leaders to answer critical questions about the quality of their CTE programs and whether learners are participating and succeeding equitably. But today's state data systems are not meeting the need for data-informed decision making.…

Purpose: This paper aims to provides a brief review of the dashboard literature, an account of the development of performance dashboards for field data collection at Westat, and more specifically for the first cycle of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). A brief concluding section offers suggestions for…

The "Forum Guide to Data Governance" highlights how data governance programs benefit education agencies and provide timely and useful best practices, examples, and resources for agencies implementing or updating their data governance programs. This resource is intended to address the needs of federal, state, and local agencies related…

The standards of educational information exchange are still firmly rooted in a Newtonian paradigm that emphasizes strict rules of information exchange. With the explosion of information since World War II, and especially its accessibility through the mechanism of the internet, this paradigm has become a barrier to effective exchanges of…

The National College Access Network (NCAN) and Exponent Partners have teamed up on a two-part report series aimed at helping organizations to become more data-driven. NCAN members have increasingly incorporated research, data, and evaluation into their critical work of serving low-income, first-generation students on their way to postsecondary…

The purpose of this teaching case is to develop a hands-on exercise on graph processing using a hybrid system. The paper provides a background on graph databases and how graph processing is supported in a hybrid system, SAP HANA. It also details step-by-step instructions on how to create, modify, and process a graph database using SAP HANA. The…

The present study examines the difficulties novice data modelers face when asked to provide a data model addressing a given problem. In order to map these difficulties and their causes, two short data modeling problems were given to 82 students who had completed an introductory course in database modeling. Both problems involve three entity sets…