Does empirical evidence or ideology most influence homeschooling policy? It depends. Where empirical research and social experience abound, regulations seem less restrictive but where there is less data or experience policies seem more restrictive and ideologically driven. By comparing Europe and the United States with a look at South Africa,…

There are marked racial and ethnic disparities in diagnosis and services for individuals on the autism spectrum, yet race and ethnicity are underreported and underexamined in autism research. The current study examines the reporting of race and ethnicity and the inclusion of participants across racial and ethnic groups in studies included in a…

Data-informed decision-making in teachers' practice, now recommended by different teacher inquiry models and policy documents, implies deep practice change for many teachers. However, not much is known about how teachers perceive the different steps that analytics-informed teacher inquiry entails. This paper presents the results of a study into…

Despite increasing pressure for policy and practice to adopt a more evidence-based approach, transferring evidence into use remains a stubborn challenge. This is largely due to a number of researcher-derived and user-derived barriers at play within institutions, organisations and systems that constrain active engagement with evidence. This paper…

International large-scale assessments such as PISA or PIAAC have started to provide public or scientific use files for log data; that is, events, event-related attributes and timestamps of test-takers' interactions with the assessment system. Log data and the process indicators derived from it can be used for many purposes. However, the intended…

The increasing datafication of teachers' work and schooling practices as evidenced through various metrics of student testing and school improvement measures have continued to grow unabated across many OECD Countries. Such practices have been fuelled by global competition for league tables such as the Programme for International Student Assessment…

In the final month of 2024, a Newsweek article celebrated an apparent victory in the Lone Star State: "Texas' Teachers Are More Diverse Than California's." In Washington, D.C., the press was slightly more subdued, but still proud: "Teacher diversity is slowing down, but D.C, offers a bright spot." These and many other headlines…

Recent research on implementation and effects demonstrates the important difference comprehensive and aligned principal pipelines can make in districts and schools. The implementation studies analyzed in depth how school districts can strategically put in place policies, processes, and infrastructures to strengthen school leadership. Research on…

An increasingly complex and demanding research landscape has seen university libraries rapidly evolve their services. While research data management, bibliometrics, and research impact services have predominantly featured in the literature to date, the full scope of support libraries are currently providing to their institutions is unknown. This…

This chapter describes how any campus can use collaborative professional integration and three "data buckets" (pre-college, during-college, and post-college buckets) to disaggregate assessment evidence, interpret findings contextually, and focus attention on realistic actions to improve student performance in the areas of leverage over…

Human resources (HR) represent the most significant investment on most of our college campuses in terms of time and financial resources. The importance of good data about the workforce begins with establishing a need for a new position. That need for data continues with recruiting, hiring, training, promoting, retaining (or not), and retiring…

Given that our current educational context has required many educators to utilize online instruction in some capacity over the past year, the purpose of this paper is to describe how literacy specialists and teachers can use digital tools to remotely engage in data-based decision-making within a collaborative professional learning community.…

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities are growing at a faster rate than any other racial group in the United States. The opportunity to address significant inequities impacting this community is hiding in our country's postsecondary data. Collections of data at the U.S. Department of Education and our institutions of higher…

Despite wanting to make data-informed decisions, the educational system is experiencing the common problem of being data rich yet information poor. Educators have data, often a plethora of data; however, the system struggles to turn that data into effective action. Rising out of information poverty requires three shifts. First, the educational…

Although data modeling, the employment of statistical reasoning for the purpose of investigating questions about the world, is central to both mathematics and science, it is rarely emphasized in K-16 instruction. The current work focuses on developing thinking about data modeling with undergraduates in general and preservice teachers in…