Internationally, there has been a policy push for using student data for instruction. Yet, research has noted few examples of actually understanding how this data-use practice takes place. This study presents a case of an instructional data team making sense of student data. The study shares data to show how teachers' process for using data to…

This study identifies a population of students who have an intermediate amount of relevant content knowledge and skill for working with data, and characterizes their approach to interpreting a challenging data-based visualization. Thirty-three undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory environmental science course reasoned about salinity…

Storing data and interpreting data are two very different endeavors; interpreting data is necessary for its transformation into actionable knowledge and new questions. On its own, data are not meaningful information. However, data visualization, like art making, offers another means to create order from chaos; it is an opportunity to identify…

Responding to the industry need for professionals to employ data-driven decision-making, educational institutions offer courses in business analytics (BA). Since BA professionals require a unique set of skills different from those found in specific business disciplines, a pedagogical framework to impart such knowledge and skills was developed. The…

Working with practicing teachers, this article demonstrates, through the facilitation of a statistical activity, how to introduce and investigate the unique qualities of the statistical process including: formulate a question, collect data, analyze data, and interpret data.

In this commentary, Mijke Rhemtulla, Riet van Bork, and Denny Borsboom write that they were delighted to see Bainter and Bollen's paper as a focus article in "Measurement." In their view, psychological researchers who use SEM rely too reflexively on reflective measurement, without sufficiently considering whether their indicators are…

Academicians, experts, and other stakeholders have contributed extensively to the literature on university rankings also known as "league tables". Often the tone is critical usually focused on the subjective aspects of the process; e.g., the list of the universities' attributes used in the rankings, their respective weights, and the size…

Refutational text is one of the many instructional techniques that have been proposed to be used in education as a way to achieve effective learning. The aim of refutational text is to transform misconceptions into conceptions that are in line with current scientific concepts. This is done by explicitly stating a misconception, refuting it, and…

This article engages the philosophy of science of data, with a focus on the extent to which data are always already imbued with racializations. As Alexander Weheliye has argued, racializations are not to be reduced to race but rather is the sociopolitical process that hierarchizes and differentiates bodies producing the entangled by-products of…

Courses: Advanced Public Speaking, Argumentation Theory. Objectives: This activity aims to enhance students' ability to make statistics compelling and persuasive.

Bar graphs and histograms are core statistical tools that are widely used in statistical practice and commonly taught in classrooms. Despite their importance and the instructional time devoted to them, many students demonstrate misunderstandings when asked to read and interpret bar graphs and histograms. Much of the research that has been…

This qualitative phenomenological study explored how 19 school leaders in seven California comprehensive high schools were making sense of data and using data to transform their schools by closing achievement gap for historically underrepresented students. Data is a powerful tool in the hands of school leaders to transform patterns of inequality…

Research has shown that: (1) Curriculum-based monitoring (CBM) can be easily implemented and interpreted by teachers (e.g., Fuchs, Deno, & Mirkin, 1984); (2) student outcomes have improved when teachers use CBM to inform instructional decision making (e.g., Fuchs, Fuchs, Hamlett, & Stecker, 1991); (3) reliable and valid measures have been…

The field of citizen science is one of the fastest growing sectors in informal education, specifically because of the new opportunities that are now available within today's digitized and networked world. This paper describes a unique co-created citizen science project, WeatherBlur, which brought fishermen, elementary students, and teachers from…

Technological developments, social networking and the emergence of sensory micro-computation platforms have facilitated the recent growth of citizen science-public participation in scientific research. Citizen science provides lay audiences platforms for data collection and classification alongside access to large scientific databases. Although…