A small group of high school students performed a virtual laboratory experiment in Second Life that mimicked a real experiment in both its appearance and procedure. Lab report grades were equivalent to report grades for hands-on experiments, and the quality of students' results was similar. Results of an attitudinal survey show that students…

School districts and state departments of education frequently must choose between a variety of methods to estimating teacher quality. This paper examines under what circumstances the decision between estimators of teacher quality is important. We examine estimates derived from student growth percentile measures and estimates derived from commonly…

This paper relates the "Agile School", an emerging archetype of the enterprise architecture: "Processes of Organizational Leadership" for leading and managing strategies, tactics and operations of forming in Higher Education Institutions. Agile School is a system for innovation and deep transformation of University Institutions…

This report is a collaborative research effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC), Concordia International School Shanghai, and NIST International School in Bangkok, Thailand, to help inform international school leaders in Asia about significant developments in technologies supporting teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in primary and…

Students explored variation and expectation in a probability activity at the end of the first year of a 3-year longitudinal study across grades 4-6. The activity involved experiments in tossing coins both manually and with simulation using the graphing software, "TinkerPlots." Initial responses indicated that the students were aware of…

Student access to technology is no longer a privilege: it is a prerequisite for full participation in high-quality education opportunities. While this fundamental right to technology access for learning is nonnegotiable, it is also just the first step to equitable learning opportunities. Society must continue to ask questions about the…

The Indian Institute of Science is proud to host the fully in-person sixteenth iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) during July 11-14, 2023. EDM is the annual flagship conference of the International Educational Data Mining Society. The theme of this year's conference is "Educational data mining for…

Clinical simulations provide opportunities for novice school leaders to synthesize and enact their professional knowledge, decision-making approaches, and skills in an authentic, challenging environment. This article outlines the use of clinical simulations and standardized individuals to enhance and extend the preparation of novice school…

The purpose of this article is to analyze the perspectives of doctoral students on creativity and learning in the virtual environment. The researchers investigated the following central research question: to what extent is creative thinking fostered in virtual environments? In addition, the paper also examined how creativity is practiced in…

Differential item functioning (DIF) analysis is a key component in the evaluation of the fairness and validity of educational tests. The goal of this project was to review the status of ETS DIF analysis procedures, focusing on three aspects: (a) the nature and stringency of the statistical rules used to flag items, (b) the minimum sample size…

An understanding of the impact of user avatar alteration in relation to social presence is needed to fully realize the potential of Second Life for higher education usages, which the research literature reveals as an environment that provides increased social presence. Prior studies focused primarily on the impact of system design attributes on…

The purpose of the quantitative regression study was to explore and to identify relationships between attitudes toward use and perceptions of value of computer-based simulation programs, of college instructors, toward computer based simulation programs. A relationship has been reported between attitudes toward use and perceptions of the value of…

The goal of this research was to understand the different kinds of learning that take place in "Mod The Sims" (MTS), an online "Sims" gaming community. The study aimed to explore users' experiences and to understand learning practices that are not commonly observed in formal educational settings. To achieve this goal, the…

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM…

In the teaching of physics at upper secondary school level (K10-K12), the students are generally taught to solve problems analytically, i.e. using the dynamics describing a system (typically in the form of differential equations) to compute its evolution in time, e.g. the motion of a body along a straight line or in a plane. This reduces the scope…