New challenges in education demand effective solutions. Although Learning Analytics (LA), Educational Data Mining (EDM) and the use of Big Data are often presented as a panacea, there is a lot of ground to be covered in order for the EDM to answer the real questions of educators. An important step toward this goal is to implement holistic…

We turn a critical lens to ethical research practices in the context of 'insider' higher education research. Tensions arise due to the risks involved in navigating academic identity and teacher-researcher authenticity. We offer two case studies where ethical tensions surfaced methodological concerns for researchers and participants. Case study one…

Although various academic disciplines use data papers to support effective research practices, data papers are still uncommon in the educational sciences. Main goals of data papers are enhancing transparency regarding research processes and supporting data sharing among researchers and thus, open science. As many educational research projects…

The evidence deployed in the policy process is often done so from sources hoping to shape policy along preconceived ideological lines. This chapter presents the data and research cited as evidence in tuition-free community legislation proposed and enacted by 10 states, along with the sources that produced this evidence when applicable. Results…

In this article, I examine campus climate studies through radical incrementalism and queer pragmatism. As a statistician and institutional researcher, I embrace data-informed decisions to promote resource reallocation and policy formation. Yet, as a queer person, I have misgivings about incrementalism as a dominant strategy that aligns queerness…

What guidance does research provide about how to improve school district performance in the United States? Despite over 30 years of inquiry on the topic of effective districts, existing frameworks are relatively narrow in terms of disciplinary focus (primarily educational leadership perspectives) and research design (primarily qualitative case…

Despite the widespread adoption of data-based decision making (DBDM) policies in schools around the world, there is limited understanding of how teachers use DBDM in K-12 classrooms and the impact of DBDM training on teacher practices and student outcomes. This scoping review aims to provide an overview of the existing literature on the uses of…

Digital learning environments are becoming increasingly ubiquitous as a wide range of EdTech products and services enter classrooms and households across the globe. One salient attribute of these environments is their capacity to generate large amounts of data as students interact with the technology. These data logs can help construct a detailed…

Continuous improvement methods, widely used in fields such as medicine, can help educators identify and try out adjustments in practice, known as "change ideas," which contribute to better outcomes and more equitable systems for students. Since 2018, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in 24 organizations across the…

This paper offers a methodological framework to research data practices in education critically. Data practices are understood in the generic sense of the word here, i.e., as the actions, performances, and the resulting consequences, of introducing data-producing technologies in everyday educational situations. The paper first distinguishes…

Educational data mining is used to discover significant phenomena and resolve educational issues occurring in the context of teaching and learning. This study provides a systematic literature review of educational data mining in mathematics and science education. A total of 64 articles were reviewed in terms of the research topics and data mining…

Teaching students to reason with data is not a totally new enterprise. A small but insistent statistics education community has been studying the process for decades. This commentary provides an introduction to some major themes of that research, in order to provide common ground for conversations between learning sciences researchers and those…

Protection of student privacy is critical for scaling up the use of learning analytics (LA) in education. Poorly implemented frameworks for privacy protection may negatively impact LA outcomes and undermine trust in the discipline. To design and implement models and tools for privacy protection, we need to understand privacy itself. To develop…

In recent years, career and technical education (CTE) programs that include quality work-based learning (WBL) opportunities for students have gained significant traction among educators, policymakers, and stakeholders as an effective way to prepare students for the labor market. However, a lack of data on WBL--which many CTE students participate…

LearnSphere is a web-based data infrastructure designed to transform scientific discovery and innovation in education. It supports learning researchers in addressing a broad range of issues including cognitive, social, and motivational factors in learning, educational content analysis, and educational technology innovation. LearnSphere integrates…