Washington State has some of the highest percentages of school immunization exemptions in the country. We compared school immunization records in a rural school district in Pierce County, Washington, to immunization records in the state immunization information system (IIS) and parent-held records. Correcting school immunization records resulted…

The articles in this issue call for a deeper and better understanding of data, their use, the conditions that are most conducive for using data well, how individuals and groups of practitioners make sense of the data before them, and the intended and unintended consequences of data use for school improvement. The authors together craft important…

The current standards and accountability regime describes effective teaching as the ability to increase student achievement on standardized tests. This narrow definition of effectiveness can lead principals to create school cultures myopically focused on student achievement data. A "laser-like focus on academic achievement," if employed…

This study attempts to determine if a relationship exists between first-to-second-year retention and social network variables for a cohort of first-year students at a small liberal arts college. The social network is reconstructed using not survey data as is most common, but rather using archival data from a student information system. Each…

People have always been fascinated with investigating their home--the Earth. For centuries, maps have stirred imaginations and inspired explorations of the unknown. Maps are a rich source of information, showing spatial relationships between climate, vegetation, population, landforms, river systems, land use, soils, natural hazards, and much more.…

Learning technical computing skills is increasingly important in our technology driven society. However, learning technical skills in information systems (IS) courses can be difficult. More than 20 percent of students in some technical courses may dropout or fail. Unfortunately, little is known about students' perceptions of the difficulty of…

This study developed a QR-based U-Learning Material Production System (QR-ULMPS) that provides teachers with an education tool to motivate college level students enrolled in a liberal arts course. QR-ULMPS was specifically designed to support the development of u-learning materials and create an engaging context-aware u-learning environment for…

All of the states in this study have recently been involved in school accountability system reform. Since 2011, the states have taken advantage of a federal program to give them flexibility around certain requirements of the "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 (NCLB), the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary…

Assessment practices and requirements are very broad and vary widely among academic programs and from one institution to the other. Consequently, we noticed, in the recent years, increased volumes of research and interest geared into the assessment process and procedures in various disciplines in higher education. In this paper, we present and…

Accounting educators continuously seek ways to effectively integrate instructional technology into accounting coursework as a means to facilitate active learning environments and address the technology-driven learning preferences of the current generation of students. Most accounting textbook publishers now provide interactive, web-based learning…

This document is the fourth and final installment of this Forum series of guides on longitudinal data systems (LDS). One goal of the National Forum on Education Statistics (the Forum) is to improve the quality of education data gathered for use by policymakers and program decisionmakers. An approach to furthering this goal has been to pool the…

With advances in research, technology, and assessments, and with a focused effort, the U.S. education system can lead the world in becoming a data-driven enterprise. This publication provides leaders from business, philanthropy, and education with background on data issues; describes challenges that must be overcome; and makes recommendations for…

The objective of this research is to understand how a set of systems, as defined by the business process, creates value. The three studies contained in this work develop the model of process-based automation. The model states that complementarities among systems are specified by handoffs in the business process. The model also provides theory to…

Information sharing is a fundamental goal of information systems (IS). Yet information sharing, although critical and much acclaimed, is complex in terms of its concepts and implementation. How to leverage this phenomenon while implementing an IS is discussed at length in the literature. Both academics and practitioners in IS are striving to…

The purpose of this study is to gain a finer-grained picture and better understanding of the travel patterns of library users, and the activities, demographics, and other factors that affect library access. Previous studies of physical accessibility of public libraries, which have focused on library users' single-destination trips and their travel…