The equity-efficiency tradeoff and cumulative return theories predict larger returns to school spending in areas with higher previous investment in children. Equity -- not efficiency -- is therefore used to justify progressive school funding: spending more in communities with fewer financial resources. Yet it remains unclear how returns to school…

This chapter aims to answer some of the questions that emerge when carrying out educational ethnography in a blended learning environment. The authors first outline how Virtual Ethnography (VE) has been developed and applied by other researchers. Then, to better illustrate the approach, they describe a doctoral research project that implemented…

Background/Context: Researchers have amassed considerable evidence on the use of student performance data (e.g., benchmark and standardized state tests) to inform educational improvement, but few have examined the use of nonacademic indicators (e.g., indicators of social and emotional well-being) available to educators, and whether the factors…

Through this paper, we explore "unbundling," the separation of various aspects of education, resources, teaching and assessment (Ossiannilsson et al., 2015) and "rebundling," where these activities are "recombined into new configurations with little loss of functionality" (Ge et al., 2004, p. 1). We chart the…

College students have a better chance of succeeding in school when they receive high-quality advising. High-quality advising, when characterized by frequent communications between advisers and students, early outreach to students showing signs of academic or nonacademic struggles, and personalized guidance that addresses individual student needs,…

When the "AEM Quality Indicators with Critical Components for Higher Education: Institutes of Higher Education" (ED613012) was updated, a series of interviews were conducted with experts in colleges, universities, and related associations with knowledge and experience in system- or campus-wide accessibility. Additionally, a literature…

Drawing on a community-university (CU) partnership between a non-profit organization that serves teen families, a housing organization and a university, this paper discusses the opportunities and challenges that can arise when engaging vulnerable youth in research. Through this paper, we share reflections on promising practices and ethical…

Seamless learning has been recognized as an effective learning approach across various dimensions including formal and informal learning contexts, individual and social learning, and physical world and cyberspace. With the emergence of seamless learning, the majority of the current research focuses on realizing a seamless learning environment at…

The recommendations in this brief create a framework for using data effectively to make instructional decisions. The availability of student-level data for educators has pushed forward the movement to strengthen the role of data to guide instruction and improve student learning. While improvements in technology and assessments, as well as recent…

Over the past decade, chronic absence has gone from being a virtually unknown concept to a national education metric that provides every school in the nation with critical data on how many students are missing so many days of school it jeopardizes their academic success. The inclusion of chronic absence in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was…

Accountability seems forever engrained into the K-12 environment, as has been the expectation of delivering quality education to school aged children and adolescents. Yet, repeated failure of this expectation has focused the public's and policy maker's attention on the limitations of major accountability systems. This paper explores applications…

The "Annual Disability Statistics Supplement" is a companion report to the "Annual Disability Statistics Compendium." The "Supplement" presents statistics on the same topics as the "Compendium," with additional categorizations by demographic characteristics including age, gender and race/ethnicity. In…

Temporal analyses are critical to understanding learning processes, yet understudied in education research. Data from different sources are often collected at different grain sizes, which are difficult to integrate. Making sense of data at many levels of analysis, including the most detailed levels, is highly time-consuming. In this paper, we…

A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a course that is offered fully online and is usually open for enrollment by any individual, with no limit on the number of participants. MOOCs are a popular resource for learning worldwide with over 23 million new learners registering for MOOCs in 2017 alone. Coursera, the most popular MOOC platform, has…

Data is a crucial component in educational success. It gives educators the power to address student needs, study what strategies work, and make necessary changes so that every student has the greatest opportunity. Today, educators, parents, and students have access to more data than ever before and have access to more technology tools to…