Background: As the state standards increase, along with the instructional rigor within developed curriculum and state accountability, the need to improve ineffective teachers and their practices in the classroom has become a national priority. The need for relevant professional development that meets both the instructional needs of the teacher and…

This study examines what aspiring principal candidates in one university-based preparation program learned as a result of developing and implementing a school improvement plan. A case study approach was used to examine 53 aspiring principals' reports of what they learned from implementing school improvement plans. Findings revealed three…

Probabilistic reasoning underpins much of middle school students' future work in data analysis and inferential statistics. Unfortunately for many middle school students, probabilistic reasoning is not intuitive. One specific area in which students seem to struggle is determining the probability of compound events (Moritz and Watson 2000). Research…

Using a constructivist approach to teacher education, the present study compared the learning outcomes of students in two child development courses infused with instruction in how early education and childcare policy is formed, implemented, and applied. The intervention course, however, included a community-based, semester-long early education and…

Substance abuse in adolescents has been recognized as a public health problem at the national and global levels. Adolescents are at risk for experimenting with substances. School nurses in secondary schools are well positioned to screen and counsel students on substance use. In this project, school nurses' self-efficacy levels increased in using…

Increasingly, students training in the biological sciences depend on a proper grounding in biological statistics, data science and experimental design. As biological datasets increase in size and complexity, transparent data management and analytical methods are essential skills for undergraduate biologists. We propose that using the software R…

The use of large, open-source data sets is ubiquitous in scientific research. Scientists--ranging from meteorologists to chemists to epidemiologists--are researching and investigating critical questions using data that they have not themselves collected. To contribute to the growing effort to bring data science into classrooms, the authors have…

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to examine the relationship between focused keyboarding instruction and the required standardized assessments mandated by Federal and State authorities. Initial mandates required that the first assessment to be administered online would be the Writing Assessment by year 2014. The assessment given in…

This research summary provides the key findings and interpretive summary--chapters 3 and 4--from the full report, "Reaching for Improvement: Teacher Evaluation and its Role in Instructional Improvement." The full report contains additional details on the context, methodology, and findings of this study. This document has minor…

Humans have always been lured by the idea that they can use data to understand a phenomenon and make predictions about it. Learning analytics, in this sense, promise to understand and optimize learning and the environments in which it occurs by collecting data from learners and learning contexts. In this regard, this study systematically examines…

With the impactful nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, this manuscript describes a teaching case for COVID-19 vaccinations to develop students' knowledge of analytics and supply chain management. The experiential learning activity is developed in the context of an undergraduate upper-level course on descriptive analytics and data visualization. The…

The Organization of Economic, Cooperation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (OECD's PISA) is explored as a site of science as an actor managing a social life. Its calculations form at the interstices of multiple historical lines as a comparative reason about nations, societies, and populations. That reason is…

Drawing upon the growing datafication of contemporary schooling, our purpose in this article is to use topological thinking as an analytical device to better understand the professionals and practices within emergent data infrastructures. We address this by attending to an influential national (and subnational) data infrastructure of school…

In this policy forum commentary, we call for improved national and state-level data collection and access relevant to the principal pipeline. We focus specifically on how access to quality data can inform, has informed, and is critical to policy and practice across three segments of the principal pipeline--principal preparation, licensure, and…

The Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment (CLNA) was an exciting and innovative change under the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (Perkins V). The CLNA was identified to support data-driven decision-making and more closely align planning, spending and accountability activities under Perkins V. After the…