We present findings from an exploratory quantitative content analysis case study of 156 doctoral dissertations from Georgia State University that investigates doctoral student researchers' methodology practices (used quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods) and data practices (used primary data, secondary data, or both). We discuss the…

Educational Data Mining is an emerging discipline which seeks to develop methods to explore large amounts of data from educational settings, in order to understand students' behavior, interests and results in a better way. In recent years there have been various works related to this specialty and multiple data mining techniques derived from this…

Reflecting the inter-connected reality of today's world, contemporary education is striving to keep up with the exponentially rapid changes that individuals around the globe are facing. Innovative educational proposals carry labels such as connective learning (Downes, 2006), e-learning 2.0 (Downes, 2005), education 2.0 (Carr et al., 2008), or…

This chapter aims to answer some of the questions that emerge when carrying out educational ethnography in a blended learning environment. The authors first outline how Virtual Ethnography (VE) has been developed and applied by other researchers. Then, to better illustrate the approach, they describe a doctoral research project that implemented…

Existing data sets can be an efficient, powerful, and readily available resource for addressing questions about developmental science. Many of the available databases contain hundreds of variables of interest to developmental psychologists, track participants longitudinally, and have representative samples. In this article, the authors discuss the…

The growth in the availability of longitudinal data--data collected over time on the same individuals--as part of program evaluations has opened up exciting possibilities for evaluators to ask more nuanced questions about how individuals' outcomes change over time. However, in order to leverage longitudinal data to glean these important insights,…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of conducting ethnographic research. Methodology definition and key characteristics are given. The stages of the research process are described including preparation, data gathering and recording, and analysis. Important issues such as reliability and validity are also discussed.

Researchers in career and technical education often ignore more effective ways of reporting and treating missing data and instead implement traditional, but ineffective, missing data methods (Gemici, Rojewski, & Lee, 2012). The recent methodological, and even the non-methodological, literature has increasingly emphasized the importance of…

Since its inception, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has been committed to the practice of documenting its statistical methods for its customers and of seeking to avoid misinterpretation of its published data. The reason for this policy is to assure customers that proper statistical standards and techniques have been observed,…

Information and communications technologies today are used in virtually any university course when students prepare their papers. ICT is also needed after people are graduated from university and enter the job market. This author is an instructor in the field of informatics related to health care and social sciences at the Riga Stradins…

We review the history and current trends in the field of Educational Data Mining (EDM). We consider the methodological profile of research in the early years of EDM, compared to in 2008 and 2009, and discuss trends and shifts in the research conducted by this community. In particular, we discuss the increased emphasis on prediction, the emergence…

In this dissertation we develop a framework that combines data mining, statistics and operations research methods for improving real-time decision support systems in healthcare. Our approach consists of three main concepts: data gathering and preprocessing, modeling, and deployment. We introduce the notion of offline and semi-offline modeling to…

The age of networked research and networked data analysis is upon us. "Wired Magazine" proclaims on the cover of their July 2008 issue: "The End of Science. The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome to the Petabyte Age." Computing technology is sufficiently complex at this point…

The efficacy of online learning programs is tied to the suitability of the program in relation to the target audience. Based on the dataset that provides information on student enrollment, academic performance, and demographics extracted from a data warehouse of a large Southwest institution, this study explored the factors that could distinguish…