The Roadmap presents county-level data and rankings on 20 indicators of wellness across five domains: economic development, physical health, mental health and safety, education inputs, and education outcomes. We believe these five domains capture the interconnected conditions and resources that are necessary for a child to succeed, both inside and…

Whether the goal is to identify and describe trends and variation in populations, create new measures of key phenomena, or describe samples in studies aimed at identifying causal effects, description plays a critical role in the scientific process in general and education research in particular. Descriptive analysis identifies patterns in data to…

Last month several news organizations reported on the emergence of "fusion centers"--vast data clearinghouses, operated by state law-enforcement agencies, that can instantly call up key personal information on anyone: telephone numbers, insurance records, family ties, and much more. Architects of the fusion centers say they are a…

Reviews hierarchical linear models that have been developed to address problems of the measurement of change and the unit of analysis in educational research. Introduces a three-level hierarchical model that should constitute the basic paradigm for future quantitative research on student learning. (Author/BJV)

An issues-oriented framework for selecting data to support typical state-level planning analyses is presented. Attention is focused on questions concerning the planning issues, and the general data requirements required to support a given state's analytical questions and decision requirements. State-level planning issues in postsecondary education…