Excerpt from the book Assessing the Educational Data Movement to be published in April, 2013 One of the issues to emerge in policy discourse and from funders as the educational data movement was taking hold involved personalized learning. While education…
Blog Archives
What is the Classical Model of Teaching and is it the Best?
This is an extract from one of the chapters of my upcoming book titled: The Educational Data Movement: Crossing Boundaries, Searching for Student Success. One of the greatest challenges of our time—of research, of school leadership, and now of measurement—is…
What is Big Data For Education?
Big data is a new term that can imply both new forms data and new analytic techniques. While big data is routine for many businesses and some sciences, it is new to education. Two characteristics of big data (in addition…
Posted in Big ideas & theories, Information infrastructure, Signs of the times Tagged with: #big data
Data, Decision, or Information Science for Education? — These are SOME of the Questions
In recent months there has been increasing attention to the need for education technologists who can focus on the many large and not so large datasets that are proliferating in education. Some have called for exploration into the educational data…
Why Should Educational Researchers Pay Attention to the Data Movement?
Why should regular educational researchers, those working with science or social studies or emerging literacy pay attention to the changes in education around data. I can think of three reasons.
What Contribution does “The Fight Club” Make to Progress in Education?
On May 17, 2012, political science professor Patrick McGuinn posted a paper titled: Fight Club Are advocacy organizations changing the politics of education? where he discussed a network of education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs) that regularly meet to plan strategy…
What is a Data Governance Plan and Why is it Needed?
Data can be powerful. It provides analysts and businesses with insights into patterns and behaviors that mere intuition rarely can. It holds tremendous potential for education as well. At the same time, data can have personal and private information. The…
Posted in Big ideas & theories, Signs of the times, Uncategorized Tagged with: Data Diversity, datagovernence
Why is the KIPP Character Report Card Interesting?
The KIPP Character Report Card involves a set of metrics developed by KIPP for use in tracking their students. In 2005 Dave Levin, one of KIPP’s co-founders, began to look seriously at issues of student character. KIPP had always stressed…
Is Data-Driven Decision Making Dead or Just in Rehab?
The recent release of Teacher Data Reports (TDR) in New York City made the problems with evaluations based on tests scores visible for many people. The idea of evaluating teachers based on how well their students do is a simple…
Can MBAs Save Our Schools?
In a recent post, Chris Tessone with the slightly right-of-center Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggested MBA types working in school systems (supported by large foundations) should give up on that lost cause because the cultural and organizational issues are too…
Posted in Signs of the times
