As part of a study investigating research productivity of sociology PhD students in Australia, an application to the federal government's Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) aimed to establish a baseline count of completed sociology doctorates by university. It was anticipated that university totals might be different from PhD…

While there are many different types of education data, policymakers and education leaders often place heavy emphasis on data from large-scale quantitative measures, such as annual state assessments. But data from these sources alone do not provide a complete picture of learning and are often not well suited to informing improvements at the local…

Schooling in Australia has become subject to increased processes of data-based governance. This article draws upon the insights of an experienced teacher, 'Meriam', who, having taught more than 34-years over almost a 50-year span, reflected upon the nature of such changes. Utilising theorising in relation to datafication processes and…

Background: Understanding knowledge utilisation in policymaking is a core task for the social and political sciences. However, limitations and biases abound in commonplace approaches to measuring such use. Consequently, we have little systematic evidence of the extent to which knowledge sources are used in policy decisions. Aims and objectives:…

Assessment trace data, such as mouse positions and their timing, offer interesting and provocative reflections of individual differences yet are currently underutilized by testing professionals. In this article, we present a 10-step procedure to maximize the probability that a trace data modeling project will be successful: (1) grounding the…

Language research has come to rely heavily on large-scale, web-based datasets. These datasets can present significant methodological challenges, requiring researchers to make a number of decisions about how they are collected, represented, and analyzed. These decisions often concern long-standing challenges in corpus-based language research,…

This toolkit is designed to guide educators in developing and improving practical measurement instruments for use in networked improvement communities (NICs) and other education contexts in which principles of continuous improvement are applied. Continuous improvement includes distinct repeating processes: understanding the problem, identifying…

Systems for learning and producing knowledge, such as career and technical education (CTE), often reproduce inequities unless an equity-focused lens is used when designing, implementing, and evaluating programs. This framework presents guidance for conducting CTE research with an intentional focus on equity. Developed by the CTE Research Network's…

There is a growing need to empirically evaluate the quality of online instructional interventions at scale. In response, some online learning platforms have begun to implement rapid A/B testing of instructional interventions. In these scenarios, students participate in series of randomized experiments that evaluate problem-level interventions in…

Psycholinguistics is the research of language in the mind: The architecture of storing the different components of language in our memory, and the ways we access that knowledge when processing and producing language. Psycholinguists usually conduct quantitative experimental research in which certain standards of experimental design, data…

A critical issue in using fine-grained gameplay data to measure learning processes is the development of indicators and the algorithms used to derive such indicators. Successful development--that is, developing traceable, interpretable, and sensitive-to-learning indicators--requires understanding the underlying theory, how the theory is…

Measurement systems give colleges a structure for collecting, sharing, and acting on data. The guidebook and tools presented here help faculty, staff, college leadership, and policymakers understand and use measurement systems--and specifically use data to improve completion rates, close institutional performance gaps, and facilitate economic…

In today's educational landscape, state and local educational agencies (SEAs and LEAs) often experience challenges connecting large-scale accountability data with actual school improvement initiatives. These challenges tend to be rooted in incoherent design and use of data systems for continuous improvement. As we aim to support SEAs in…

The increased use of quantitative education data is often regarded by scholars as evidence of the emergence of 'governing by numbers'. These scholars ascribe major stakeholders such as the OECD and nation states agency as they produce, distribute and consume data, and respond to these with policy and management initiatives. This paper argues that…

This dissertation is composed of projects on three aspects of gathering and learning from data in the social sciences: drawing representative samples, taking valid measurement, and making warranted inductive inferences. Chapter one studies the challenge of drawing representative human samples. It is well documented that most samples used by…