Data Driven Decision Making in Schools: The Influence of Professional Development on Educator Perceptions

This study examined the influence of in-service training on educator perceptions concerning the use of Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM) in schools to guide instructional practice. Participants included 63 educators teaching in a southeastern metropolitan city school district. As part of the investigation, participants attended a 90-minute professional development training that focused on integrating DDDM into instructional practice. A pre-assessment and post-assessment questionnaire was completed by each participant to investigate the effects of the training on each participant’s perception of DDDM. Using paired samples t-tests, the investigation demonstrated a significant difference in perceptions for three of nine questionnaire item pairs (pre and post pairs). Results supported that the training had a meaningful impact on educator perceptions related to some aspects of DDDM. Furthermore, a Training Effectiveness Scale indicated that overall, participants endorsed the training as useful and effective. The current study ends with a discussion on limitations for this study, practical implications, and suggestions for future research

Using Data-Informed Instruction to Drive Education: Keeping Catholic Education a Viable and Educationally Sound Option in Challenging Times

This study was conducted to obtain an understanding of the perceptions that Catholic schoolteachers possessed regarding data informed instructional (DII) practices, specifically curriculum based measurement (CBM). The researchers investigated changes in teacher’s perceptions from pretest to posttest to determine the impact of the 90-minute professional development on teacher’s perceptions of DII. Results showed that Catholic schoolteachers did perceive that they lacked sufficient knowledge to effectively implement curriculum-based measures prior to the training. Significant growth was noted with regard to their perceptions of their knowledge in some areas. According to the results of the paired samples t-test, a meaningful change in educators’ perceptions of DII was observed for three of the nine pairs of questionnaire items from pre to post-test. The findings support previous research and pave the way for future research on the impact of short, one-day professional development sessions

Training Teachers to Implement Components of a Functional Behavior Assessment in a Rural School District: Taking Steps toward a Proactive Classroom

Abstract The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (1997) mandates the use of proactive, positive measures of discipline in schools, thereby challenging how educators approach behavior problems exhibited by students. The use of Functional Behavioral Assessments (FBA) is proposed as an alternative to an overreliance on reactive and punitive measures. Thus the aim of the study was to train rural educators on three primary components of the FBA. Rural educators were targeted due to the data regarding high teacher attrition rates in rural educatio

Giving software its due through community-driven review and publication

A recent editorial in Nature Methods, “Giving Software its Due”, described challenges related to the development of research software and highlighted, in particular, the challenge of software publication and citation. Here, we call attention to a system that we have developed that enables community-driven software review, publication, and citation: The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) is an open-source project and an open access journal that provides a light-weight publishing process for research software. Focused on and based in open platforms and on a community of contributors, JOSS evidently satisfies a pressing need, having already published more than 500 articles in approximately three years of existence

SIAM CSE 2019 Minisymposterium: The Journal of Open Source Software

<div>This poster describes the progress of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a free, open-access journal designed to publish brief papers about research software. The primary purpose of JOSS is to enable developers of research software to receive citation credit equivalent to typical archival publications. JOSS papers are deliberately short and required to include a summary describing the purpose and high-level functionality of the software (written for a diverse, non-specialist audience), a statement of need, authors and their affiliations, and key references, as well as link to an archived version of the software (e.g., DOI obtained from Zenodo). Upon acceptance, papers receive a CrossRef DOI. Rather than a review of a lengthy software paper (including, e.g., methodology, validation, sample results), JOSS submissions undergo rigorous peer review of the article and software, including documentation, tests, continuous integration, and licensing. The JOSS review process is modeled on the established approach of the rOpenSci collaboration. The entire submission and review process occurs openly on GitHub; papers not yet accepted remain visible and under review until the authors make appropriate changes for acceptance—unlike other journals, papers requiring major revision are not rejected. JOSS was founded in May 2016, and in its first year published 111 articles in a variety of fields. Since then, JOSS has published over 494 articles (as of 23 Feb 2019), and submissions continue to grow.</div