Building a better data culture can be the path to better results and greater equity in schools. But what do we mean by data? Your students are not just statistics. They aren't simply a set of numbers or faceless dots on a proficiency scale. They are vibrant collections of experiences, thoughts, perspectives, emotions, wants, and dreams. And taken…

While there are many different types of education data, policymakers and education leaders often place heavy emphasis on data from large-scale quantitative measures, such as annual state assessments. But data from these sources alone do not provide a complete picture of learning and are often not well suited to informing improvements at the local…

The responsibilities of a general physical educator can be challenging and at times overwhelming. Whether teaching a full day of general physical education, or inclusive physical education classes that include a student or multiple students with disabilities, the expectation is that all students will be provided age and developmentally appropriate…

Written with faculty in mind, "Assessment by Design" is a practical resource that will also be useful to student affairs staff and administrators dedicated to using assessment to improve learning in curricular and co-curricular settings. This book presents the Cycle of Assessment as a framework that supports assessment in service of…

The authors discuss the use of surveys for collecting data from a population sample and emphasise the importance of being careful with the language of data collection. [For "The Data Files 5: Graphs for Exploring Relationships," see EJ1355504.]

Adaptive teachers use student data to guide instruction. Learn about using an anecdotal record form to support adaptive teaching. In this article, the authors describe how teachers can use learning trajectories to make adaptive decisions to meet the needs of their students. They provide an example using the U .S. Math Recovery Council's learning…

The authors provide novice teachers with a step-by-step introduction to linguistic analysis, a tool to identify gaps between English learners' proficiency levels and the language demands of their coursework in the content areas.

Students with and at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) struggle to acquire and develop writing skills. To support their students' unique needs, it is important for teachers to monitor student writing progress to make instructional decisions based on data. In this article we describe methods for progress monitoring focused on…

Education can be transformed if we eradicate our fixation on big data like standardized test scores as the supreme measure of equity and learning. Instead of the focus being on "fixing" and "filling" academic gaps, we must envision and rebuild the system from the "student" up--with classrooms, schools and systems…

Citizen science is a research collaboration between scientists and volunteers who provide data for education, conservation, and environmental protection. Volunteers, often the locals in the area, provide data on species occurrence while researchers perform distribution mapping or other data analysis. Social networking sites including Facebook,…

Analyzing and interpreting data is essential to the practice of scientists and is also an essential science and engineering practice for science teaching and learning. Although working with data has benefits for student learning, it is also challenging, particularly with respect to aspects of work with data that are not yet very common in schools,…

This paper responds to the need to support complexities of literacy instruction by identifying and illustrating teaching strategies used by a practicing special education teacher rooted in a multi-theoretical approach to teaching literacy. We argue the importance of teaching from multiple theoretical standpoints and utilizing student-centered,…

Data collected in many biology laboratory classes are on ratio or interval scales where the size interval between adjacent units on the scale is constant, which is a critical requirement for analysis with parametric statistics such as t-tests or analysis of variance. In other cases, such as ratings of disease or behavior, data are collected on…

Although the use of real-world data sets is encouraged when teaching statistics, it can be difficult for instructors to find meaningful data for introducing students to univariate descriptive statistics such as the mean, median, and percentiles. The recent lead contamination of the water supply in Flint, Michigan, provides a real-life data set…

Photographs offer teachers a way to collect and explore student work that might other wise go unnoticed or minimally examined. A teacher might use photographs to analyze students' strategies and work to promote future instructional practices that result in higher student achievement. As a tool, photographs document student understanding and…