Systems analysis and design is a crucial task in system development and is included in a typical information systems programme as a core course. This paper presented a preliminary study on gender differences in studying a systems analysis and design course of an undergraduate programme. Results indicated that male students outperformed female…

Over the last 4 decades, the school effectiveness and school improvement research bases have gained prominence and recognition on the international stage. In both a theoretical and empirical sense, they have matured through a wide range of well-documented projects, interventions, and innovations across a range of countries, describing how efforts…

Around the world there is a preoccupation with improving the performance of schools and school systems. Comparisons made between countries through PISA and PERLs have led to a preoccupation, and in some cases, an obsession, with securing a high position in the international league tables. The minds of policy-makers and politicians alike are…

Until recently, states focused on ensuring the presence of a "highly qualified teacher" in every classroom. Under the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), this title described a teacher holding at least a bachelor's degree and the appropriate state license and…

For years California has been a leader in public education. In 1999, the state implemented some of the strongest content standards in the country through its main accountability metric, the Academic Performance Index (API). The state has also signed onto the Common Core State Standards, taking important steps to ensure its students are college-…

As state policymakers strive to ensure that every student is taught by an effective teacher and is ready for college and 21st-century careers, they must also make drastic budget cuts. States cannot do more with less without collecting and using quality data to determine which programs and policies increase student achievement and the state's…

America can no longer afford an education system that fails to use data effectively to guide decisionmaking. The education sector is facing ever-increasing demands to improve student outcomes, reduce burden, increase efficiency, and improve transparency. These demands cannot be met without the strategic and effective use of data. Due to the…

Student achievement depends upon successful passage through a series of transitions: elementary to middle school, middle school to high school, high school to college. Increasing the efficiency of successful transitions requires the collection and analysis of student data across these transition points. Yet long-standing separations between…

This paper is meant to help designers of educational accountability systems think more critically about the questions they want to ask schools and the kinds of analyses that best answer these questions. There are two essential questions in school evaluation: how good is this school, and is it getting better? Each of these questions then can be…

The role of performance evaluation and testing in the development of an operational accountability system for urban public schools is discussed. Management science techniques and concepts and econometric methods are used to specify an accountability system, determine its data requirements, and evaluate alternative measures of systems performance.…

This paper presents the evolution of and the lessons learned from a research approach to assessment of student outcomes, specifically of student academic achievement, being used by the Puerto Rico Statewide Systemic Initiative (PR-SSI), which is one of the statewide systemic initiatives for science and mathematics sponsored by the National Science…

The Educational Quality Indicators initiative, a 3-year collaboration between Alberta Education and 12 school districts, generated 10 action research projects that developed educational indicator systems with a broad range of student outcomes, methods of data collection and interpretation, and outcomes reporting. Field testing of these systems…

A conceptualization of educational indicator systems is presented, and their guiding principles and criteria are outlined. Three developmental projects are described that represent the indicator systems that promise to provide an explanatory framework for education. An indicator system should be perceived as an integrated whole in which the…

This review of selected literature examines the National Science Foundation's standards-based systemic reform theory in the context of research reported by science, mathematics, and urban education policy experts. This review is specifically concerned with viewing evidence of relationships among identified change variables that are associated with…

Contends that systemic reform is required to improve student achievement. Describes 10 system-building standards from the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity (NAPE): the educational environment, governance and policy issues, preservice and inservice education, teaching practices, assessment practices, personnel and curricular materials…