The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) is leading and supporting the implementation of a Teacher and Principal Evaluation (TPE) system in all school districts in the state. This study examines the progress of four years of TPE implementation, 2013 to 2016. The study draws on nearly 60,000 survey responses from principals and teachers…

Faced with increasing demands for accountability, teachers are having to base their instructional decisions and choice of interventions on data on student performance. This book shows how to make this otherwise daunting task much more manageable by means of case studies and countless evidence-based forms and graphs. Although this book often refers…

Information technology (IT) outsourcing poses a potential job loss threat to IT professionals, which can decrease job security, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. The problem that this study addressed was the perceived role of IT outsourcing in the job stress, job dissatisfaction, and turnover intention of IT professionals. The…

The "big data revolution" has penetrated many fields, from network monitoring to online retail. Education and learning are quickly becoming part of it, too, because today, course delivery platforms can collect unprecedented amounts of behavioral data about students as they interact with learning content online. This data includes, for…

Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) is the evaluation and assessment of learning gained outside a traditional academic environment for college credit, certification, or advanced standing toward further education or training. The term PLA encompasses a wide spectrum of assessment methods, including, but not limited to, credit by examination, challenge…

Maggie Kinnaman is an APPA Emeritus Member, APPA Fellow, and Past APPA President. In this article she provides helpful tips for completing the APPA Facilities Performance Indicators (FPI) survey for 2013, which closed on December 16, 2013. She began by calling attention to some enhancements that have been added this past year, and encouraged…

Learning analytics is a relatively new field of inquiry and its precise meaning is both contested and fluid (Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine & Haywood, 2011; LAK, n.d.). Ferguson (2012) suggests that the best working definition is that offered by the first Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference: "the measurement, collection,…

"Library Spaces for 21st-Century Learners: A Planning Guide for Creating New School Library Concepts" focuses on planning contemporary school library spaces with user-based design strategies. The book walks school librarians and administrators through the process of gathering information from students and other stakeholders involved in…

A systematic analysis was conducted of measurement and reporting practices related to procedural fidelity in single-case research for the past 30 years. Previous reviews of fidelity primarily reported whether fidelity data were collected by authors; these reviews reported that collection was variable, but low across journals and over time. Results…

Learning analytics has been defined as the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs. The potential use of data and learning analytics in educational contexts has caught the attention of educators and…

Dealing with the vast quantities of text that students generate in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other large-scale online learning environments is a daunting challenge. Computational tools are needed to help instructional teams uncover themes and patterns as students write in forums, assignments, and surveys. This paper introduces to the…

The article, "Distributed Revisiting: An Analytic for Retention of Coherent Science Learning" is an interesting study that operates at the intersection of learning theory and learning analytics. The authors observe that the relationship between learning theory and research in the learning analytics field is constrained by several…

This article introduces the special issue from the 2015 Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. We describe the current state of the field and identify some of the trends in recent research. As the field continues to expand, there seem to be at least three directions of vigorous growth: (1) the inclusion of multimodal data (gesture,…

This paper provides a novel, conceptually driven stance on the state of the contemporary analytic challenges faced in the treatment of dialogue as a form of data across on- and offline sites of learning. In prior research, preliminary steps have been taken to detect occurrences of such dialogue using automated analysis techniques. Such advances…

This article is aimed at teachers already experienced with activities involving small, student-collected data sets and who are now ready to begin working with large, online data sets collected by scientists and engineers. The authors discuss challenges, instructional strategies, and sources of appropriate lesson plans. With guidance, plus online…