This research brief describes recent methodological initiatives with the Public Libraries Survey. It describes how starting with the 2022 data, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) updated geographic identifiers to better align Census Bureau geography types with the library's legal service area, with the goal of enabling data users to…

Higher education professionals often are tasked with providing evidence to stakeholders that programs, services, and practices implemented on their campuses contribute to student success. Furthermore, in the absence of a solid base of evidence related to effective practices, higher education researchers and practitioners are left questioning what…

Multiple data collection or research methods exist for evaluating library spaces. Faced with numerous choices and limited time for gathering data, it becomes challenging for information professionals to determine the best way to proceed with evaluating their libraries' physical spaces. There is a gap in the literature on best practices for…

The exercise of quantifying the energy consumption data assembled through household surveys, either by the recall-based approach or the meter-based approach, remains a challenging task, especially in rural areas of developing countries. In this article, we propose a device-based bottom-up accounting method for estimating household energy…

A quick review of national policy documents reveals how lifelong learning has evolved as the key principle for a comprehensive education and learning strategy from cradle to grave. This raises major challenges for how to assess and report the state of lifelong learning in UNESCO Member States. It is in this context that this article critically…

Extension faculty and staff are constantly planning, implementing, and evaluating programming efforts. Data from participants are needed for assessing changes in knowledge, attitude, and behavior through summative and formative evaluation. However, collecting these data can be time-consuming and hard to achieve. A technological tool called…

"Using Data for Continuous Improvement in Educator Preparation" provides case studies that illuminate and contextualize the ways in which educator preparation programs determine the data they need to improve, collect data, analyze data, share data with stakeholders, and close the loop by making focused improvements based on the data.…

Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter provide an unprecedented amount of qualitative data about organizations and collective behavior. Yet these new data sources lack critical information about the broader social context of collective behavior--or protect it behind strict privacy barriers. In this article, I introduce social media…

This chapter provides examples of innovative methods and tools to collect, analyze, and report both quantitative and qualitative data in student affairs assessment.

As pressure builds to assess students, teachers, and schools, educational practitioners and policy makers are increasingly looking toward student perception surveys as a promising means to collect high-quality, useful data. For instance, the widely cited Measures of Effective Teaching study lists student perception surveys as one of the three key…

There are usually limited user evaluation of resources on a recommender system, which caused an extremely sparse user rating matrix, and this greatly reduce the accuracy of personalized recommendation, especially for new users or new items. This paper presents a recommendation method based on rating prediction using causal association rules.…

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,…

The number of academic institutions offering courses online has increased with courses being offered across almost all academic disciplines. Faculty members are often confronted with the responsibility of converting a face-to-face course to an online course while simultaneously dealing with new technologies and the interrelationship between the…

As the quality of educational outputs has been problematized, accountability systems have driven reform based upon summative assessment data. These policies impact the ways that educators use data within schools and subsequently, how teacher education programs may adjust their curricula to teach data-driven decision-making to inform instruction.…

The REL Mid-Atlantic Webinar discussed the elements in a positive school climate and shared different methods for assessing school data, including the Comprehensive School Climate Inventory. The Q&A presented in this document address the questions participants had for Dr. Cohen following the webinar. The webinar recording and PowerPoint…