We explore institutional change and organizational learning in higher education in the context of a large-scale reform of developmental education in Florida. We use statewide survey data to examine administrators' perceptions of the use and effectiveness of accountability metrics, methods to identify solutions to improve student outcomes, and…

Head Start provides access to high-quality, affordable early learning opportunities for children alongside wraparound supports for parents which can help families achieve economic security by helping to facilitate parents' attainment of college credentials. Head Start-college collaboration can also bring important benefits to colleges and…

When the primary federal law governing K-12 schooling was updated in 2015 as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), it shifted many decisions to states and districts. However, through two of its core programs (Title I and Title II-A), ESSA retained federal requirements for states to set challenging content standards, assess student performance,…

In this brief, Kaylan Baxter talks about the potentially transformative role of two connected units less commonly associated with racial justice: institutional research (IR) and institutional effectiveness (IE). Institutional research (IR) consists of a wide-ranging set of tasks conducted in support of the decision-making processes of various…

MDRC has studied a number of proven strategies for helping students stay in college and succeed there, the most effective of which combine advisers or coaches who actively reach out to students, decision-making informed by data, and extra financial support. Lessons from some of these models may be readily adapted to support students and close…

This study gathered information from practitioners on their perspectives of experiences implementing the North Carolina Kindergarten Entry Assessment (NC KEA). Initially, practitioners were invited to complete an online survey asking them to rate or provide information about several aspects related to implementing the assessment process. In total,…

Continuous improvement, a structured process for using data and research to improve educational programming, is an important component in creating and maintaining successful CTE programs. For practitioners to engage in continuous improvement--and to use data and research to go beyond accountability--they need to maintain an effective data…

Schools and districts that break the correlation between race and poverty on the one hand and academic achievement on the other hold enormous lessons for any educators willing to seek them out and ask: "Your kids are doing better than mine. What are you doing?" It is important to understand that educators who ask that question--whether…

Minoritized special education teachers of color often report feeling isolated in their work environments, affecting their sense of belonging and decision to stay in their positions. Although these teachers struggle with their identity in majority White workplaces, they are also often the only voice advocating for students of color eligible for…

Behavioral and social-emotional challenges experienced in childhood are risk factors for negative educational and health outcomes. Universal social-emotional screening in schools has been identified as an effective approach to identifying children at risk for mental health and behavioral challenges and is congruent with tiered frameworks for…

The Open Science movement has gained considerable traction in the last decade. The Open Science movement tries to increase trust in research results and open the access to all elements of a research project to the public. Central to these goals, Open Science has promoted five critical tenets: Open Data, Open Analysis, Open Materials,…

The tools and techniques of corpus linguistics have many uses in language pedagogy, most directly with language teachers and learners searching and using corpora themselves. This is often associated with work by Tim Johns who used the term Data-Driven Learning (DDL) back in 1990. This paper examines the growing body of empirical research in DDL…

This article reports a pre-post comparative study investigating whether the data-driven learning (DDL) approach has different pedagogical effects on grammar students of English as a foreign language (EFL) with different levels of English proficiency. The study entailed a treatment group (TG) of 95 first-year undergraduates who learned grammar…

Examining an interdisciplinary university course for architecture, wood science, and engineering students, this paper studies how the students' ability to master digital workflows influenced their success in learning collaborative design skills. It highlights potential challenges and opportunities posed by the introduction of new digital tools to…

Integrating data driven decision making into teacher preparation programs has been called for by several researchers in order to help lessen the barriers teachers face in using data in their teaching. This mixed methods study examined the perceptions of data use in education by pre-service teachers (N = 112) and perceived knowledge and skills…