DATA-COPE Newsletter Issue 2: Member Forums Update
Hello DATA-COPE members,
Thank you for sharing DATA-COPE with so many of your colleagues. Since the last e-mail we have increased the subscribers of the newsletter from just over 300 to over 360. The forums have been a success as well with dozens of discussions on a range of great topics. That is why I'm writing to invite you to sign up and participate. We've made the process fast and easy!
1. Head to http://forums.datacope.org
2. Click Sign Up in the top right
3. Use an existing account (Twitter, Google+, or GitHub) or sign up with your e-mail and password
Once you sign up, head over to the poll and let us know your organizational affiliation. Then, browse a few topics, add your thoughts, or post a question you have.
If you haven't signed up, the weekly digest below provides you a glimpse into what you have been missing by not registering, so go sign up today! (Note: The links below won't work unless you become a member of the forums.)
A brief summary of DATA-COPE Member Forums since we last saw you on 11-15-2014.
Popular posts
... I think there are multiple approaches that can help staff reproduce results. There are internal approaches, like you describe. A different challenge, however, is how to bring that same reproducible concept to external research support--knowing you can't (or don't want to) pay external researchers to produce the report each year. As a former SEA researcher, and current external partner committed to strengthening organizational capacity, I find that some researchers are quite comfortable delivering code as part of a project, and, that providing the code has multiple benefits. On one recent project, my team was doing research and also developing a set of business rules for a future public-facing report that the agency plans to create. This project was one that required us to merge data from two agencies, which results in a new data set that typically has its own nuances. We therefore wanted to share our process with the agencies to help them reproduce the merged analytic fi...
@Ellisott thanks for the shoutout. I was disappointed your story wasn't included in the piece :-(
It was a good piece though for sharing with folks interested in EWS work but who don't know where to start.
Also -- the Chicago model strikes again with a very long but thorough report about EWS work, this time in middle grades: http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/publications/looking-forward-high-school-and-college-middle-grade-indicators-readiness-chicago
Following CTE completers into college--new report from Virginia
This is a really interesting study that I will be sharing here in Wisconsin. We did a recent evaluation of our CTE program looking at depth of participation (comparing non-participants, to participants, to CTE concentrators). We have pretty high overall participation rates in Wisconsin, but using some regression and some matching, one of our analysts found a pretty strong positive effect on high school graduation. We looked at college going a little bit and saw a bump in postsecondary enrollment, but ran out of time to evaluate the postsecondary paths and how they differed for the three groups.
I think this gives us a reason to go back and take another look!
@BBuchanan, are you the only analyst in your agency? Do other analysts use SAS or are you running a Stata shop? We have a lot of SPSS users for lighter stuff (correlation tables, etc.), and then our accountability office and our research analysts use R after a few years of turnover + training.
How do you advocate for PD for your data analysts?
These Coursera courses are free? I know some of our staff have done some data science courses online, but I have never understood the pricing.
Popular topics
Scaling your computing environment to match your data - 4 posts - [Technology]
National Student Clearinghouse data in SLDS - 2 posts - [Technology]
Translating research-ese into policy-speak - 2 posts - [Policy]
Building an analytics team - 4 posts - [Organizations]
Operationalizing school context and the role it plays in policy - 2 posts - [Research]
Researchers guide to VLDS--overview of factors to consider with Virginia's data system - 2 posts - [Communications]
SLDS States Create New Data Use Standards Guide for Training Practitioners - 2 posts - [Communications]
Hawai’i P-20W Data Summit Presentations - 2 posts - [Communications]
Poll: Share Your Organizational Affiliation - 2 posts - [Meta]
Quasi-experimental research using administrative data - 1 post - [Research]
Data analysts and IT -- star crossed lovers or an unbeatable team? - 1 post - [Organizations]
This digest is sent as a courtesy notification from DATA-COPE Member Forums when we haven't seen you in a while.