This article reports from an empirical study on the affordances and constraints for using staged socio-political debates for authentic summative assessment of scientific literacy. The article focuses on conditions for student participation and what purposes emerge in student interaction in a socio-political debate. As part of the research project,…

The current U.S. education agenda places unprecedented attention on improving the quality of its roughly fifteen hundred teacher preparation programs. The effort places considerable weight on measuring program effectiveness and includes a push to hold programs accountable for their graduates' effects on student performance. Concerns regarding the…

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…

Background: Institutions of higher education, specifically schools of education, should play a pivotal role in supporting educators' development of data literacy for teaching. While novice teachers are often prepared to use test-based assessment data, they learn these experiences in isolated courses that do not connect to instruction or school…

Information overload is a state where information input exceeds processing capability by an individual, and adverse effects of information overload, such as becoming less productive, making bad decisions, and becoming highly selective, are growing. Guided by Glaser and Strauss' work on grounded theory, this study examined adverse impact of…

The purpose of this study was to learn from educational stakeholders what characteristics they like and dislike when viewing graphs of post-school outcomes data. We conducted six, 1-hour focus groups with teachers, administrators, and parents in which we distributed four stimuli graphs--horizontal grouped bars, horizontal stacked bars, vertical…

The need for twenty-first century information skills in engineering practice, combined with the importance for engineering programmes to meet accreditation requirements, suggests that it may be worthwhile to explore the potential for closer alignment between librarians and their work with information literacy competencies to assist in meeting…

This paper uses the Economic Market mechanisms and the 4P Marketing Mix as lenses to review the context of UK higher education (HE) and to explore the relationship between the market and marketing disciplines and practice. Four Economic Market mechanisms--autonomy, competition, price and information--are contrasted with the four Ps of marketing:…

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…

Purpose: Whilst beneficial, the use of evidence to improve teaching and learning in schools is proving difficult to achieve in practice. The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on this issue by examining the applicability of a model of rational behaviour as relates to the notion of evidence-informed practice (EIP). Specifically, exploring…

This paper aims to present the role, values, and legal policy issues facing public Library resources in supporting students to achieve academic success. Research indicates that majority of people that own or work in the Library tend to ignore some of the vital roles, values and legal policy issues paramount to libraries. Some of these issues are…

"Understanding Entry-Level Courses in American Institutions of Higher Education" outlines a study conducted by EPIC that empirically identifies the characteristics of work at the college- and career-readiness level in English/language arts, science, and social sciences courses. Using a previously collected national sample of over two…

This descriptive study of a change initiative by the Syracuse (NY) City School District informs the question, "How do school boards and districts better use research and data to inform policy decisions?" Researchers used interviews and artifacts to describe how the district developed and implemented a new discipline policy, the Syracuse…

Purpose: The study was carried out to identify information communication technologies (ICTs) used in production and marketing of bananas, to determine factors influencing intensity of use of ICT tools and to assess whether use of ICT has a significant influence on adoption of tissue culture bananas by small-scale banana farmers in Gatanga…