Even a casual observer of American college athletics can see the emergence of star black athletes in conferences that once were racially segregated. By analyzing the college origins of National Football League and National Basketball Association draft choices between 1947 and 2011, this research measures the impact of higher education…

In response to the wide-scale proliferation of "the cone of learning"--a fanciful retention chart confounded with Dale's Cone of Experience--the authors make four major claims debunking this fantasy and provide documentary evidence to support these claims. The first claim is that the data in the mythical retention chart do not make…

This study explored third-grade elementary students' conceptions of nature of science (NOS) over the course of an entire school year as they participated in explicit-reflective science instruction. The "Views of" NOS-D (VNOS-D) was administered pre instruction, during mid-school year, and at the end of the school year to track…

The importance of collecting and using data for educational decision making is clear. However, little information has been gathered about the systematic collection and use of data in early childhood. The purpose of this study was to explore teacher perceptions of data collection practices in early childhood. Participants included 137 early…

Lack of financial resources to pay for postsecondary education--perceived and actual--has been cited as a barrier to student access and persistence, particularly for Latino students. This study investigates the following question: "To what extent does financial aid affect the educational attainment of Latinos enrolled in Associate's degree…

Data-driven decision making is part of our everyday lives. For example, we examine our children's immunization charts in order to indicate what vaccinations they have received, as well as what vaccinations are missing and expired. We use information, like a chart, to make decisions about what to do and what not to do. Data-driven decision making…

Despite the importance of computerization to data use, little is known about the work of a central office when it comes to preparing for and implementing computer data systems. This study illuminates such work by drawing upon interviews and observations collected in three school districts over 11 months. We describe how central offices thought…

We aggregated and analyzed single-case research targeting math-fact fluency to investigate whether learning (behavior change) data were sufficient to summarize and compare intervention outcomes or if learning rate (learning/cumulative instructional time) data would provide divergent effect size (ES) results. We also extracted the curricular scope…

To whom should higher education institutions provide data, and what is the impact of transparency on institutions?

The American Chemical Society Examinations Institute (ACS-EI) has recently developed the Exams Data Analysis Spread (EDAS) as a tool to help instructors conduct customizable analyses of their student data from ACS exams. The EDAS calculations allow instructors to analyze their students' performances both at the total score and individual item…

Every year, Lone Star College in Texas hosts a "Men of Honor" program to provide assistance and programming to male students, but particularly those who are Hispanic and black, in hopes their academic performance will improve. Lone Star might have kept directing its limited resources toward these students--and totally missed the subset…

This article summarizes a conceptual framework and simple mathematical methods of estimating the probability that one event was a necessary cause of another, as interpreted by lawmakers. We show that the fusion of observational and experimental data can yield informative bounds that, under certain circumstances, meet legal criteria of causation.…

Doctoral student socialization is the process through which emerging scholars are inducted into their academic disciplines and the academic profession. Recent doctoral student socialization literature has expanded upon traditional notions of the process to re-conceptualize it as multidirectional and complex. This study contributes to further…

Using statistical literacy skills to determine appropriate scales to be used on graphs is an essential part of numeracy. Using several meaningful contexts, this article explains very clearly when it is appropriate and inappropriate to begin the scale of a graph at zero.

Graduate students in political science come to the discipline interested in exploring important political questions, such as "What causes war?" or "What policies promote economic growth?" However, they typically do not arrive prepared to address those questions using quantitative methods. Graduate methods instructors must…