This study aimed to discover the perspectives and experiences of elementary school teachers in rural southeast Tennessee regarding their collaborative efforts to effectively implement data-driven instruction for individual student success. The research problem is that the current collaboration efforts for teachers to implement data-driven…

To ensure all students, including historically marginalized students, reached their highest capacity, there was a focus on equity in education at the state and national levels. Minimal research existed where researchers explored principals' educational equity mindset, and I found a gap in the literature concerning the use of principals'…

This examination of secondary agricultural education students' performance was used to determine if students could perform up to industry standards. In this study, the industry standard were blueprints created by engineers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Students had to fabricate a Cost-effective Roll-Over Protective…

This qualitative research study investigated the perceptions of successful turnaround school leaders regarding factors attributing toward success, barriers thwarting success, and strategies that assisted in minimizing barriers. This study specifically investigated the perceptions of African American school leaders in urban turnaround schools in…

When many people hear the term "big data", they primarily think of a technology tool for the collection and reporting of data of high variety, volume, and velocity. However, the complexity of big data is not only the technology, but the supporting processes, policies, and people supporting it. This paper was written by three experts to…

Advanced Competition Simulations (ACS), a massive multiplayer online (MMO) strategy gaming company, has petabytes of customer data at their data center in Brentwood, Tennessee that could assist executives with decision making, but they currently do not have business intelligence software or a business intelligence and analytics (BIA) team. As is…

Higher education administrators lack strong understanding about using course evaluation data to make judgments and decisions. Using archival student course evaluation data from a pharmacy school, we examined (a) course evaluation instrument reliability and validity; (b) bivariate relationships between eight course rating items and the overall…

K-12 education resources are often allocated non-strategically, with schools spending time and money on activities that have little relationship to student outcomes. Most of these decisions take place within districts, rooted in the processes of setting schedules, staffing levels, and assignments, and creating final budgets. Local Education…

More than 65,000 teachers show up each day to work in Tennessee's public schools. At the current rate, half of these teachers will leave or retire in the next decade. The positions they vacate will be filled primarily by novice educators. What will it take to ensure Tennessee has a strong and vibrant new teacher pipeline in the years to come? This…

Increasingly, states and districts are combining student growth measures with rigorous, rubric-aligned teacher observations in constructing teacher evaluation measures. Although the student growth or value-added components of these measures have received much research and policy attention, the results of this study suggest that the data generated…

In early 2015, the Reform Support Network brought together State department of education leaders from Colorado, Delaware, New Jersey and Tennessee to discuss strategies for refining and sustaining high-quality educator evaluation systems. During the convening, representatives from the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) explained how the…

States can use their resources, including technical expertise and financial support, to provide vital data to help parents make informed decisions about their children's education. Accessible, tailored, and easy-to-understand data can help parents answer questions about their children's education such as, "Is my child on track to graduate…

Reforms of the size and scale to which Race to the Top States have committed, require unprecedented planning, oversight and problem solving to implement. Although many factors influence the outcomes of these reform efforts, performance management is a key structural element in realizing "sustainable reforms" that are durable and…

Federal education policy in recent years has encouraged state and local education agencies to embrace data use and analysis in decision-making, ranging from policy development and implementation to performance evaluation. The capacity of these agencies to make effective and methodologically sound use of collected data for these purposes remains an…

Communities face powerful challenges that require powerful solutions: a high-school dropout epidemic, youth unemployment, teen pregnancy. In an era of limited resources, those solutions must help communities to achieve more with less. A new kind of community collaborative--an approach that aspires to significant community-wide progress by…