The higher education sector today faces an environment unlike any it has seen before. Serving a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders and facing diverse and fast-changing economic, social, and political pressures, universities can benefit from corporate-like approaches such as the use of analytics to inform strategic decision-making…

The concept of data-informed decision making (DIDM), a term used interchangeably with data-driven decision making (DDDM) and data-based decision making (DBDM), is relatively new to Irish education and the school planning process. This research sought to clarify what data principals use and how they use that information for school improvement…

Under both No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act, school leaders have been mandated to employ data-driven decision-making (DDDM) to diagnose student needs, implement targeted supports, and design school improvements. However, district administrators tasked with developing principals' DDDM capacity face a tough road. The authors…

Americans share an expectation that government will serve the common good, creating inescapable pressure for public agencies--especially those that serve young children--to perform well. Yet education and human services agencies continually struggle to respond to the complex conditions in which children are born. How can they address the practical…

School psychologists regularly use decision rules to interpret student response to intervention in reading. Recent research suggests that the accuracy of those decision rules depends on the duration of progress monitoring, the number of observations available, and the amount of measurement error present. In this study, we extended existing…

"Big data" prompts a whole lexicon of terms--data flow; analytics; data mining; data science; smart you name it (cars, houses, cities, wearables, etc.); algorithms; learning analytics; predictive analytics; data aggregation; data dashboards; digital tracks; and big data brokers. New terms are being coined frequently. Are we paying…

Purpose: Different studies have analyzed the relationship between organizational learning (OL) and innovation performance (IP). However, the question of how innovation culture (IC) affects the relationship between OL and IP remains unexplored. This study aims to examine the impact of IC on the relationship between OL and various dimensions of IP,…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to examine the data conversation moves enacted by leaders and to bridge organizational leadership for equity and data-informed decision making to practice. I argue that data discussion moves with the purpose of improving equity and learning must reflect core tenets of organizational leadership for…

A multiple case study was designed to examine the components of data literacy used by formal and informal leaders to support the work of Data Teams. Nine formal leaders and ten informal leaders constituted the participants. One overarching central question and seven subquestions guided the research. The answer to the central question, How do…

The past few decades have witnessed a global enforcement of "governance by data" in education policy, including a significant increase of assessments and quantified evaluation. Within this context, this article focuses particularly on the intensifying evolvement of new (digital) information technologies and "mediated"…

This brief provides guidance to decision makers in schools, districts, state education departments, and intermediary organizations about ways that cost analyses can help inform their decisions about program choices, budgets, and strategies. It addresses questions about: (1) why cost information matters in education; (2) what cost metrics are…

The need for data-informed decisions is not limited to national policy, state systems, or senior leadership of postsecondary institutions. Decisions that impact the achievement of higher education missions are also made by students, faculty, frontline staff, and program administrators--all of who deserve data and information to support their…

As a growing entity within higher education organizational structures, enrollment managers (EMs) are primarily tasked with projecting, recruiting, and retaining the student population of their campuses. Enrollment managers are expected by institutional presidents as well as through industry standards to make data-driven planning decisions to reach…

In this study, the author makes the connection between school and district provided information and families' use of this information. Prior studies have found that over half of families eligible for school choice have information to make their decision. However, little is known about if and how families actually use formally provided information.…

In this article the authors report findings from a practice-based study that examines the cultural practices of data use among 59 science and engineering faculty from three large, public research universities. In this exploratory study they documented how faculty use teaching-related data "in the wild" using interviews and classroom…