In this article, we contest globalised notions of data as 'universally' beneficial, necessary and 'evidence-based'. We do so by drawing upon narrative accounts of the problematic ways data impact educators researching and working in university and schooling settings over time and in varied national contexts. We reveal how data are transient and…

As ongoing digitalization accelerates the execution of experiments and the documentation and storage of the corresponding data substantially, appropriate research data management (RDM) is a necessity to enable sustainable research at all. Consequently, a rethinking is currently taking place in academia. This process becomes visible by the…

Teacher-level factors are theoretically linked to student outcomes in data-based instruction (DBI; Lembke et al., 2018). Professional development and ongoing support can increase teachers' knowledge, skills, and beliefs related to DBI, as well as their instructional fidelity (McMaster et al., 2020). However, less is known about how each of these…

Objective: The Tobacco-Free Generation Campus Initiative (TFGCI) granted funding to U.S. post-secondary institutions to assist with creating 100% smoke- and tobacco-free campus policies to prevent young adult tobacco use. This study assessed grantee experiences working on campus tobacco policy change. Participants: Sixty U.S. post-secondary…

The purpose of this document is to provide techniques to assist Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition personnel with the integration of learning technology standards into their Information Technology acquisition processes. This document supports Department of Defense Instruction (DoDI) 1322.26 and the updated DoDI 1322.26 references. This…

Reading and understanding scientific literature is an essential skill for any scientist to learn. While students' scientific literacy can be improved by reading research articles, an article's technical language and structure can hinder students' understanding of the scientific material. Furthermore, many students struggle with interpreting graphs…

The year 2022 is the 20th anniversary of Joseph Schafer and John Graham's paper titled "Missing data: Our view of the state of the art," currently the most highly cited paper in the history of "Psychological Methods." Much has changed since 2002, as missing data methodologies have continually evolved and improved; the range of…

Evidence-based assessment (EBA) requires that investigators employ scientific theories and research findings to guide decisions about what domains to measure, how and when to measure them, and how to make decisions and interpret results. To implement EBA, investigators need high-quality assessment tools along with evidence-based processes. We…

Research suggests that wellbeing correlates with learning outcomes, but understanding the direction and nature of this relationship, and how to ensure positive outcomes, is still something we are seeking to understand. The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) investigated whether systems and schools are measuring wellbeing components…

In this chapter, we walk the reader through a set of scenarios that administrators might face when using different types of data on campus. We also provide guiding questions to help institutional research professionals explore how to think about these scenarios with ethics in mind.

Meta-analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) are 2 of the most prominent statistical techniques employed in the behavioral, medical, and social sciences. They each have their own well-established research communities, terminologies, statistical models, software packages, and journals ("Research Synthesis Methods" and…

Most recent research on teacher evaluation examines evaluation's measurement properties and accountability uses. Less research studies how evaluation data can improve teaching and student learning. In other contexts, researchers have examined how teachers use data to improve their practice. From general research on teachers' data use, we apply the…

In order to demonstrate the value of higher education and evaluate the effectiveness of various policies and practices, researchers are increasingly expected to merge data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) with a range of other federal and private-sector data sources. In this article, I detail a number of the most…

Online platforms offer new opportunities to study human behavior. However, while social scientists are often interested in using behavioral trace data--data created by a user over the course of their everyday life--to draw inferences about users, many online platforms only allow data to be sampled based on user activities (leading to data sets…

In this ITEMS module, we provide a didactic overview of the specification, estimation, evaluation, and interpretation steps for diagnostic measurement/classification models (DCMs), which are a promising psychometric modeling approach. These models can provide detailed skill- or attribute-specific feedback to respondents along multiple latent…