The Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) uses a group 24-hour dietary recall (Gr24HDR) to measure changes in diet quality. Participant perceptions of the tool can guide implementation practices used by EFNEP Extension staff. Focus group (FG) sessions were conducted in five states and transcripts analyzed following a framework…

In recent years, career and technical education (CTE) programs that include quality work-based learning (WBL) opportunities for students have gained significant traction among educators, policymakers, and stakeholders as an effective way to prepare students for the labor market. However, a lack of data on WBL--which many CTE students participate…

Purpose: While designing personally meaningful activities with data technologies can support the development of data literacies, this paper aims to focuses on the overlooked aspect of how learners navigate tensions between personal experiences and data trends. Design/methodology/approach: The authors report on an analysis of three student cases…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the care crisis in the United States to the fore. Unprecedented closures of child care programs throughout 2020 placed a disproportionate burden on families, and mothers in particular. For parents enrolled in college or considering postsecondary enrollment at the time of the pandemic, the loss of child care services…

In 2019, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) began exploratory data collection for the School Pension Survey (SPS). The SPS is a new data collection of elementary/secondary school teacher pension data collected at the school district level. The SPS was developed primarily in response to public demand for data on teacher and other…

Implementing institution-wide, systemic change is typically a long and often challenging task for college leaders to undertake. Because each institution is different, the combination of internal and external factors that drive institutional change can vary greatly from college to college, and from moment to moment. Achieving the Dream (ATD), which…

Clustering of educational data allows similar students to be grouped, in either crisp or fuzzy sets, based on their similarities. Standard approaches are well suited to identifying common student behaviors; however, by design, they put much less emphasis on less common behaviors or outliers. The approach presented in this paper employs fuzzing…

An innovative system-building initiative known as the STEM Learning Ecosystems Community of Practice (SLECoP) is transforming U.S. STEM education through cross-sector partnerships between schools, afterschool and summer programs, libraries, museums, and businesses, among others. Although logic models exist to describe how SLEs can make positive…

States should graduate students from high school prepared for the challenges they will face in college and their careers. Many states are working toward this goal by improving the quality of career and technical education (CTE) programs, and have looked to industry-recognized credentials as one component of this improvement. However, there is…

Well-designed digital games hold promise as effective learning environments. However, designing games that support both learning and engagement without disrupting flow is quite tricky. In addition to including various game design features (e.g., interactive problem solving, adaptive challenges, and player control of gameplay) to engage players,…

The Teacher Compensation Survey (TCS) was a research and development effort by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to explore the possibility of developing an administrative records survey that would compile compensation and demographic data on all public school teachers in the nation. A pilot survey in 2007 collected data from…

Over the past decade, chronic absence has gone from being a virtually unknown concept to a national education metric that provides every school in the nation with critical data on how many students are missing so many days of school it jeopardizes their academic success. The inclusion of chronic absence in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was…

States and districts are embarking on efforts to improve school leadership as a lever to promote school improvement. Such efforts have a solid base of research attesting to their effectiveness, and some view them as particularly cost-effective because principals "can be powerful multipliers of effective teaching and leadership practices in…

Objective: The present study extends research on campus smoking bans by examining where smokers are violating the policy at a large university in the southeastern region of the United States. Participants: The data collection was conducted by one graduate student from the university in August of 2014. Methods: A global positioning system device…

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is an international comparative study designed to measure trends in mathematics and science achievement at the fourth and eighth grades, as well as to collect information about educational contexts (such as students' schools, teachers, and homes) that may be related to student…