Under emerging policy structures in California, the responsibility for school improvement is increasingly placed upon local school districts, with County Offices of Education (COEs) playing a critical support role. In this system, districts are responsible for school improvement, with counties in charge of ensuring quality across districts and…

Data use in teaching is at the heart of current educational policy and school improvement efforts. Dispelling magical thinking that it is a simple solution to underachieving schools, this timely book explores what data use in teaching really is, how it works in theory and practice, and why it sometimes fails to achieve expected goals. Drawing on…

This case study shows how data systems can be combined to identify educational risk factors and then develop and implement solutions for addressing them. It shares a detailed account of strategies -- made possible through data systems developed by the Poverty Center -- that various stakeholders utilized to protect children in Cleveland from lead…

Effective instruction derives from collecting and analyzing student data. Data collection can be a series of observations, or progress monitoring assessments, where students are assessed regularly on a targeted skill to see if a program or instructional model is effective, or any other type of collected information that reveals knowledge to…

When attempting to use data to inform practice and policy, the availability, accuracy and relevance of that data are paramount. This article maps the range of users interested in data relating to the UK widening participation (WP) agenda. It explores some challenges associated with identifying, defining, obtaining and using data to inform…

This chapter provides guidance and encouragement about working with assessment data to improve practice and includes a research primer.

Over the decades, it is evident that exceptional learners have been excluded from participating in international assessments such as OECD's PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) due to their disabilities. Drawing on the interdisciplinary theories and perspectives of educational assessment, measurement, and early childhood special…

Accountability policies assume that educators will use student data to improve student learning, but data use in practice has turned out to be harder than theorized. The purpose of this article was to examine how science teachers in Grades 5 to 8 used data in their classrooms. Utilizing sensemaking theory, we found that teachers decided how to use…

This interview-based study explores the nature of reflective practice among postsecondary faculty by examining the types of teaching-related data faculty use during their reflection, their reflective practice process, and the contextual factors that influence that process. Our findings indicate faculty drew on both numeric and non-numeric data…

Members of the Data Science Program at George Washington University (GWU) designed and implemented a tuition-free two-week summer camp at GWU for high-school students from the Washington Metro Area. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of the Chief Information Officer and his staff were our main partners in the project. The…

With the growing popularity of MOOCs and sharp trend of digitalizing education, there is a huge amount of free digital educational material on the web along with the activity logs of large number of participating students. However, this data is largely unstructured and there is hardly any information about the relationship between material from…

This article shares what "Educational Leadership" authors have to say about doing data right, which is the theme of this issue. The following questions are addressed in this article: (1) Are you using data to guide improvement?; (2) Are you looking at the right kinds of data?; (3) Are you using data to motivate students?; and (4) Are you…

The contribution of data use in schools has been proven via visible changes in policy and practice in schools (instrumental effects), changes in practitioners learning or cognition (conceptual effects) and changes in opinions or attitudes regarding teaching or policy-making (symbolic effects). Nevertheless, limited research is available on the…

This chapter discusses principles that support using data about teaching and learning and offers several strategies particularly well suited for use by institutional researchers at small colleges in helping faculty, staff, and administrators use data on student learning for improvement.

Despite abundant data and increasing data availability brought by technological advances, there has been very limited education policy studies that have capitalized on big data--characterized by large volume, wide variety, and high velocity. Drawing on the recent progress of using big data in public policy and computational social science…