Many organizations use dashboards to monitor and analyze important performance measures. Data dashboards present the most important information (sometimes called key performance indicators, or KPIs) about processes and outcomes in a concise, easy-to-digest format. Dashboards get their name from the clusters of instruments and gauges drivers use to…

States cannot make good policy and practice decisions--and ultimately cannot improve student performance--if they do not have basic information about how students are performing along the way. As such, Achieve focused on states' publicly reported student performance against college- and career-ready (CCR) indicators in all 50 states and the…

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) periodically undertakes research projects to keep themselves and the higher-education community in general, informed about current and emerging institutional practices. College completion rates, and how to improve them, have been in the forefront of the higher…

In this study, we applied decision trees (DT) to extract a compact set of pedagogical decision-making rules from an original "full" set of 3,702 Reinforcement Learning (RL)- induced rules, referred to as the DT-RL rules and Full-RL rules respectively. We then evaluated the effectiveness of the two rule sets against a baseline Random…

The Early Fractions Test is a paper-pencil test designed to measure mathematics achievement of third- and fourth-grade students in the domain of fractions. The purpose, or intended use, of the Early Fractions Test is to serve as a student pretest covariate and a test of baseline equivalence in the larger study. In this report, we discuss our…

This document records testimony from a hearing held to discuss higher education and transparency as Congress is working to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. Member statements were presented by: (1) Honorable Susan A. Rankin, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development; and (2) Honorable Brett Guthrie, Chairman,…

The purpose of this exploratory research study was to examine the perceptions of seven northeast United States, college-based, Peace Education program directors regarding their respective programs' characteristics and the challenges they face. This qualitative study was designed to fill a gap in the literature by examining the perceptions of…

Background and objectives: The evaluation of public health law requires reliable accounts of underlying statutes and regulations. States often enact public health-related statutes with nonuniform provisions, and variation in the structure of state legal codes can foster inaccuracy in evaluating the impact of specific categories of law. The optimal…

This summer, perhaps while you were lounging around the pool in the blistering heat, the blogosphere was buzzing about data taken at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The buzz reached a crescendo in the first week of July when both Fermilab and CERN announced the results of their searches for the Higgs boson. Hard data confronted a theory nearly…

In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits "re-turns" to data. These "re-turns" draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of "re-turn" is not simply about…

Closing the U.S. academic achievement gap is as complex as it is comprehensive due to the disproportion of instructional opportunities available to underserved student populations. Underserved student populations are defined as minority and/or students of color from low-socioeconomic families and communities, English language learners and recent…

Established in December 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Roundtable on Data Science Postsecondary Education was charged with identifying the challenges of and highlighting best practices in postsecondary data science education. Convening quarterly for 3 years, representatives from academia, industry, and…

Given that work-based learning (WBL) can -- and should be -- a key driver of student career readiness in these efforts, it is essential that all states have a robust work-based learning continuum of experiences and exposure that spans K-16. WBL is an essential element of career and technical education (CTE), and ExcelinEd's CTE Playbook series…

Lorain County Community College (LCCC) was designed for access, however, not necessarily completion. The college was unprepared for students who wanted to earn a degree but then often didn't make it to graduation. In 2011, LCCC retained fewer than six in ten students. Its three-year graduation rate was 8 percent. For African American students, it…

Common Core proponents and detractors debate its merits, but students have voiced their opinion for years. Using a decade's worth of data gathered through design-research on youth voice, this article discusses what high school students have long described as more ideal learning environments for themselves--and how remarkably similar the Common…