This report considers the use of a focus group as a data collection tool in early childhood research. The report outlines one researcher's experience, analyzing the difficulties of gaining meaningful data during focused group discussions, considering in some depth the impacts of careful management on the validity of the findings, providing…

The Program for International Student Assessment Young Adult Follow-up Study (PISA YAFS) is a follow-up study with students who participated in PISA 2012 in the United States. The study is designed to measure how performance on PISA 2012 relates to subsequent measures of outcomes and skills of young adults on an online assessment, Education and…

In 2019, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 5082 (SB 5082), which directed the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to establish a Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Committee to build upon the work of the previous Social Emotional Learning Indicators (SELI) Workgroup. The purpose of the SEL Committee is to promote and expand SEL…

This report presents conceptual frameworks for inclusive learning, good practices in learning cities and recommendations for the future. The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on life in cities, as well as exposing and exacerbating almost all forms of inequality. Access to high-calibre, resilient infrastructure, reliable basic services…

School climate has received considerable attention in the literature and educational policy as a potential target for school improvement and school safety efforts. This paper provides a critical review and synthesis of the literature on school climate, with a particular focus on topics related to measurement, data collection, analysis, as well as…

Education in Australia is driven by measurement of progress. Music education, however, requires students to engage in creative and experiential tasks. This article will address the inevitable conflicts between these two by suggesting that measurements of student work in fine detail can be made within a practical and engaging classroom without…

Community schools have a long history of helping students succeed in school by addressing the problems they face outside of school. But without specific data on students and the full range of their needs, community schools cannot be as effective as they would like to be. Driven by the desire to make more data-informed decisions, the Children's Aid…

While working in the Social and Emotional Support Services (SESS) for Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland (MCPS), the author initiated a project to collect data on services to students with emotional needs. During the 2016-2017 school year, MCPS was the 17th largest school district in the country with nearly 160,000 students speaking 150…

We developed a brief, informant-report interview for assessing autism spectrum conditions (ASC) in adults, called the Developmental, Dimensional and Diagnostic Interview-Adult Version (3Di-Adult); and completed a preliminary evaluation. Informant reports were collected for participants with ASC (n = 39), a non-clinical comparison group (n = 29)…

Recently there has been a growth in the surveillance of students' online activities. This has been facilitated not only by the increasing numbers of digital devices, but also through surveillance creep (Marx, 1998). Drawing upon this concept and associated ideas, including data creep, policy creep and concept creep, this paper explores the digital…

Analysing the behaviour of student performance in classroom education is an active area in educational research. Early prediction of student performance may be helpful for both teacher and the student. However, the influencing factors of the student performance need to be identified first to build up such early prediction model. The existing data…

Low-cost devices have widened the use of multimodal data in experiments providing a more complete picture of behavioural effects. However, the accurate collection and combination of multimodal and behavioural data in a manner that enables reproducibility is challenging and often requires researchers to refine their approaches. This paper presents…

Applied behavior analysis (ABA), or the application of behavioral principles to important social issues, has long served a crucial role in programming for special education students. Its procedures have been well established in the research literature and many deemed as evidence-based practices for students with and without disabilities.…

Publicly-available datasets, though useful for education, are often constructed for purposes that are quite different from students' own. To investigate and model phenomena, then, students must learn how to repurpose the data. This paper reports on an emerging line of research that builds on work in data modeling, exploratory data analysis, and…

Evaluators can work with brief units of text-based data, such as open-ended survey responses, text messages, and social media postings. Online crowdsourcing is a promising method for quantifying large amounts of text-based data by engaging hundreds of people to categorize the data. To further develop and test this method, individuals were…