Data & Dragons I love games. I played board games as a kid; monopoly, career, mousetrap, and more. When I first got to college, I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons. I was so intrigued by the notion of creating interactive fiction on-the-fly using just dice and our imaginations. I still am. Fast forward to
Just a few years ago, a video displaying statistics went viral on YouTube. Yes, statistics! Hans Rosling’s 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes was uploaded and today has over 7 million views. Pretty neat, huh? Of course I was excited by the video; what nerd wasn’t? I was also inspired. Although I didn’t have access
My colleague recently attended a meeting of school officials from around the state discussing approaches to solving problems in schools suffering the greatest academic distress. Lots of ideas were shared, considered, and dismissed. Consensus came when a superintendent stood up and pitched a program his former district had employed. At no point during the superintendent’s
Fall is the time of year where data describing achievements of the prior school year are made public and available for analyses. One of the many research projects we conduct annually is a complete evaluation of each item we employ in our data collection tools. The focus of this evaluation is two-fold: first, to determine
With an increased emphasis on collaborative teaming in schools, there has been a subsequent spread in the adoption of common formative assessments, or CFAs for short. CFAs provide teachers who are covering the same curricular standards to assess idea comprehension or skill acquisition close on the heels of instruction. These assessments provide collaborative teams with