The School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) is managed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. SSOCS collects extensive crime and safety data from principals and administrators of public schools in the United States. Data from this collection can be…

This book provides a comprehensive introduction by an extraordinary range of experts to the recent and rapidly developing field of learning analytics. Some of the finest current thinkers about ways to interpret and benefit from the increasing amount of evidence from learners' experiences have taken time to explain their methods, describe examples,…

Identifying effective literacy interventions for teachers of very young children is important, but it is not easy. In this case study, we share our experiences implementing a quasi-experimental evaluation of an early literacy program. We describe the design and context of the study and discuss three key issues that we encountered with data…

Students often struggle to interpret graphs correctly, despite emphasis on graphic literacy in U.S. education standards documents. The purpose of this study was to describe challenges sixth graders with varying levels of science and mathematics achievement encounter when transitioning from interpreting graphs having discrete independent variables…

This article draws upon recent theorising of the "becoming topological" of space--specifically, how new social spaces are constituted through relations rather than physical locations--to explore how standardised data, and specifically test data, have influenced teachers' work and learning. We outline the varied ways in which teacher…

There is much debate over the number of interviews needed to reach data saturation for themes and metathemes in qualitative research. The primary purpose of this study is to determine the number of interviews needed to reach data saturation for metathemes in multisited and cross-cultural research. The analysis is based on a cross-cultural study on…

This chapter provides an example of how one university's institutional research office played an active role in using data from institutional studies to guide the university toward courses ripe for change, faculty toward successful teaching strategies, students toward successful learning behaviors, and the university toward assessing the impact of…

This article examines the effects of incorporating information and communication technologies in schools in terms of distributive justice. To do so, four issues that are central to educational justice are discussed: scarcity of resources, the positional nature of education, peer effects, and biases in educational decision-making. The discussion…

The usefulness of the online Skype system for qualitative data collection has been well documented, but its application in qualitative data analysis has been largely ignored. This article provides insight into the use of Skype in the context of interdisciplinary team research, with a focus on the analytical phase of a qualitative investigation.…

Each year hundreds of institutions will administer national surveys to measure the engagement of their students. However, stakeholders on college campuses, such as educators (faculty, instructors, student affairs educators, and disability services administrators) and institutional research staff who work with this information are often unaware of…

This article describes the unique benefits of discourse analysis, a qualitative sociolinguistic research methodology, for evaluating financial literacy counseling. The methodology is especially promising for organizations that may lack the resources to implement "gold standard" large scale, randomized, experimental, or quasi-experimental…

The current study explored preservice and inservice teachers' perspectives on data literacy for teaching. Semi-structured interviews were employed with 12 teacher candidates in elementary and special education. The findings revealed participants' misconceptions regarding formative and summative data; their understanding of the value of formative…

Interdisciplinary studies foster integration of ideas across disciplines. The knowledge building pedagogy, with its 12 principles and associated technology, Knowledge Forum®, provides multifaceted support for linking ideas across disciplines and communities. This exploratory study aims to assess the extent to which elementary-school students…

One of the characteristics of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is that the overall number of social interactions tend to be higher than in traditional courses, hindering the analysis of social learning. Learners typically ask or answer questions using the forum. This makes messages a rich source of information, which can be used to infer…

Personalization is crucial for achieving smart learning environments in different lifelong learning contexts. There is a need to shift from one-size-fits-all systems to personalized learning environments that give control to the learners. Recently, learning analytics (LA) is opening up new opportunities for promoting personalization by providing…