The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) launched the volunteer-led Asia-Pacific Alumni Relations Survey in 2014 to provide a resource for alumni relations professionals to benchmark performance internally and against fellow institutions of higher education. That was the first survey CASE has done on alumni relations programmes…

The accountability movement and high-stakes testing fail to attend to ongoing instructional improvements based on the regular assessment of student skills and teacher practices. Summative achievement data used for high-stakes accountability decisions are collected too late in the school year to inform instruction. This is especially problematic…

Background: The increasing focus on education as an evidence-based practice requires that educators can effectively use data to inform their practice. At the level of classroom instructional decision making, the nature of the specific knowledge and skills teachers need to use data effectively is complex and not well characterized. Being able to…

This event focused on the What Works Clearinghouse practice guide, "Using Student Achievement Data to Support Instructional Decision Making" (ED506645). During the event, the presenter, Sharnell Jackson, led school data teams in activities involving analysis of their own student data. This Q&A addressed the questions participants had…

The purpose of this module is to illustrate examples of how courses in educational leadership programs can effectively and efficiently meld lessons on leadership with lessons on data collection and analysis. The rationale behind emphasizing this combination is very straightforward: America's schools need leaders who are adept with data-based…

Business Intelligence is a major expenditure in many organizations and necessary for competitive advantage. These expenditures do not result in maximum benefits for the organization if the information obtained from the Business Intelligence System (BIS) is not used in the management decision-making process. This quantitative research study used an…

K-12 education resources are often allocated non-strategically, with schools spending time and money on activities that have little relationship to student outcomes. Most of these decisions take place within districts, rooted in the processes of setting schedules, staffing levels, and assignments, and creating final budgets. Local Education…

Central to the mission of most educational institutions is the task of preparing the next generation of citizens to contribute to society. Schools, colleges, and universities value a range of outcomes--e.g., problem solving, creativity, collaboration, citizenship, service to community--as well as academic outcomes in traditional subjects. Often…

In light of the emergence of statistical analysis techniques based on data mining in education sciences, and the potential they offer to detect non-trivial information in large databases, this paper presents a procedure used to detect factors linked to academic achievement in large-scale assessments. The study is based on a non-experimental,…

This study examines the perceptions of data-driven decision making (DDDM) activities and culture in organizations driven by a social mission. Analysis of survey information from multiple stakeholders in each of eight social enterprises highlights the wide divergence in views of DDDM. Within an organization, managerial and nonmanagerial staff…

Many schools identified by states as needing improvement through their Elementary and Secondary Education Act waivers have selected Response to Intervention (RTI), a three-tiered instruction program sometimes referred to as tiered levels of instruction, as one of their main strategies for improving school performance and closing achievement gaps.…

Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest assisted Milwaukee Public Schools in developing a fidelity monitoring system for measuring schools' progress in implementing Response to Intervention (RTI). The study examined the ratings produced by that system to determine the system's reliability, schools' progress in implementing RTI, and whether ratings…

This position paper introduces the relatively new field of learning analytics, first by considering the relevant meanings of both "learning" and "analytics," and then by looking at two main levels at which learning analytics can be or has been implemented in educational organizations. Although integrated turnkey systems or…

In higher education, and in community colleges in particular, there is a need to engage faculty and staff in closing the loop--using evidence for assessment, planning, and decision-making. Connect to Learning, a Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) funded grant project brings together 26 colleges and universities to work as…

Classroom observations are sometimes a challenging form of data collection. Not only are interpretations of those observations subject to the researcher's theoretical lens, but communication between the researcher and the teacher is often delayed until well after the observed events. This article reports research that focused on the pedagogical…