Most teachers welcome the opportunity to become more effective educators, and look for ways to improve their own teaching practice. With the dizzying array of state tests, district assessments, and program-specific rubrics, many are at a loss as to how to begin using data to improve their practice. There are many ways teachers can use data to…

Over the past five years, the No Child Left Behind Act, with its mandates for collecting and documenting student achievement statistics, has fueled a surge in the volume of data collected by schools, districts, and state education departments. This information explosion has gone hand in hand with technology's growing affordability and…

Institutional researchers frequently use national datasets such as those provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The authors of this chapter explore the adjustments required when analyzing NCES data collected using complex sample designs. (Contains 8 tables.)

This study examines cross-national differences in returns to literacy skills and explores possible explanations for such differences. Data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) are analyzed using multilevel models. Returns to literacy skills are higher in liberal market economies (LMEs) than in social market economies (SMEs).…

The purpose of this study was to examine the perspectives of key policy informants on the factors that they believed influence policy decisions in literacy education. Participants were selected because they had significantly influenced, or had attempted to influence, policy decisions in literacy at either the national or state level.…

This study examined whether the impact of student-faculty interaction on a range of student outcomes--including academic achievement, goals, self-confidence, well-being, and attitudes--differed for women and men. The data were drawn from a national longitudinal sample of college students (N = 17,637) who were surveyed upon entry to college in 1994…

Choosing the most appropriate method to handle missing data during analyses is one of the most challenging decisions confronting researchers. Often, missing values are just ignored rather than replaced with a reliable imputation method. Six methods of data imputation were used to replace missing data from two data sets of varying sizes; this…

This paper puts forth a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to estimating higher education institutions' per-student education costs (PSCs) in an effort to redress a number of methodological problems endemic to such estimations, particularly the allocation of shared expenditures between education and other institutional activities. An example…

State accountability systems that are based on test data and the No Child Left Behind Act have put educators under great pressure to improve their students' scores on standardized tests. Much has been written about the possibility that school faculties will resort to "drill and kill," a response that will reduce the quality of children's…

The problem of dimensionality with respect to Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) specifically and, more generally, "g" or fluid intelligence, has been a long-standing issue. The present article reports two studies examining the dimensionality of both the original Set II of the APM (n = 506) and a short form (n = 644), using principal…

For some districts, the current obsession with data grows out of the need to comply with No Child Left Behind and additional accountability-related mandates. For others, it dates way back before the phrase "data-driven decision making" rolled so frequently off the tongues of educators. In either case, there is no denying that an integral…

The colourful, vigorous territorial display behaviour of the Siamese fighting fish, "Betta splendens", has great appeal for both pet enthusiasts and animal behaviourists. Their beauty, longevity, easy maintenance and rearing make them a popular pet and an ideal science laboratory specimen. This investigation utilises "B. splendens" to test for the…

This article examines levels of involvement of weekly church attenders in Catholic parishes in Australia, New Zealand and the United States through an analysis of data from the International Congregational Life Survey. Factor analysis was used to identify four questionnaire items related to parish involvement which were then combined to produce a…

In the process of collecting assessment data in the author's introductory sociology course, he made a startling and disappointing discovery. For the most part, students simply were not bothering to read the basics version of the introductory survey textbook that he assigned. This discovery presented him with two related challenges. First, he had…

The public school superintendency is the most powerful position in U.S. schools. Yet research has shown that women who hold the position have difficulty talking about power (Brunner, 2000). I designed a mixed methods study to investigate how women school superintendents viewed their uses of power. A survey was sent to all women superintendents…