Grading is one of teachers' greatest challenges and most important professional responsibilities. For more than a century, grades remained the primary indicator of how well students performed in school and stayed the basis for making important decisions about students (Guskey, 2015). Traditional grading practices are subjective at best and do not…

In this article, I review and discuss the work presented in this special issue while focusing on a number of issues that warrant further investigation in validation research. These issues pertain to the nature of the validation processes, the processes and mechanisms that support validation during comprehension, the factors that influence…

This article provides a systematic literature review about nonprofit and for-profit organizations using "big data" to inform performance improvement initiatives. The review of literature resulted in 4 peer-reviewed articles and an additional 33 studies covering the topic for these contexts. The review found that big data and analytics…

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) moves education further along the path toward becoming the evidence-based and data-driven profession that policy makers have continually called for. They have stressed the need for hard evidence to undergird educational decisions rather than relying on anecdotes and intuitions. This means teachers must…

Database files and additional log files of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) contain an enormous volume of data which usually remain unexploited. A new methodology is proposed in order to analyse these data both on the level of both the courses and the learners. Specifically, "regression analysis" is proposed as a first step in the…

Much is being said in education about the value of adopting data-based or analytics approaches to instructional improvement. One important group of stakeholders in this effort is the faculty. "In many cases, the key constituency group is faculty, whose powerful voice and genuine participation often determine the success or failure of…

There has been a recent shift in university-district partnership models from traditional transactional partnerships, which lack a shared purpose, to transformational partnerships that are mutually beneficial to both universities and school districts. These transformational research-practice partnerships have gained popularity in the United States…

Purpose: When school leaders advance strategic plans focused on improving educational equity through data-driven decision making, how do policies-as-practiced unfold in the daily work of science teachers? The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach: This ethnographic study examines how data-centric accountability and…

Despite a narrative that sees learning analytics (LA) as a field that aims to enhance student learning, few student-facing solutions have emerged. This can make it difficult for educators to imagine how data can be used in the classroom, and in turn diminishes the promise of LA as an enabler for encouraging important skills such as sense-making,…

Educational researchers, along with universities in general, form part of the social field of knowledge production. Schools of education, as with all professional schools, are boundary organizations in the sense that they not only produce knowledge, but also train teachers, counselors, and administrators and have an impact on curriculum and…

This mixed method study was a practitioner inquiry into the teacher evaluation system that was enacted as a result of Pennsylvania House Bill 1901 (Act 82 of 2012). The study was an effort to gain an in-depth understanding of (a) factors that led to the passage of the Act 82 teacher evaluation policy, (b) what the policy was intended to do, and…

In an effort to promote learning in classrooms, political science instructors are increasingly turning to interactive teaching strategies--experiments, simulations, etc.--that supplement traditional lecture formats. In this article, I advocate the use of student-generated data as a powerful teaching tool that can be used in a variety of ways to…

London schools continue to constitute an extraordinary "success story." By common consent, the government school system in London achieves extremely good results compared to the rest of England, and students from disadvantaged backgrounds do particularly well. In 2014, the authors sought to document and provisionally explain the London…

Policy makers and others charged with driving economic growth often assume a link between entrepreneurship education and business start-up. However, there is little by way of supporting literature in this regard, with few studies exploring impact measures that relate to actual venture creation. This paper considers two routinely collected data…

Background: With the growing emphasis for educators to use data to inform their practice, little has been done to consider the means by which the educators can acquire the requisite data literacy skills. This article provides a context for why schools of education can and must play an important role in preparing teachers to use data. Purpose: This…