The benefits of making data-informed decisions to improve learning rely on educators correctly interpreting given data. Many educators routinely misinterpret data, even at districts with proactive support for data use. The tool most educators use for data analyses, which is an information technology data system or its reports, typically reports…

Purpose: The study was carried out to identify information communication technologies (ICTs) used in production and marketing of bananas, to determine factors influencing intensity of use of ICT tools and to assess whether use of ICT has a significant influence on adoption of tissue culture bananas by small-scale banana farmers in Gatanga…

The need for twenty-first century information skills in engineering practice, combined with the importance for engineering programmes to meet accreditation requirements, suggests that it may be worthwhile to explore the potential for closer alignment between librarians and their work with information literacy competencies to assist in meeting…

Social media are at the heart of the daily communications of adolescents. In many cases, however, adolescents are unaware of the consequences of the long-term availability of their online personal information. Given the rising prevalence of online background checks on potential partners, college applicants, and job candidates, online search…

The author explores the extent to which online learning resources help level the playing field through mediating the effects of grade point average (GPA) and gender in determining course grades. Study findings reveal that a greater use of online resources can fully offset the effects of gender and partially offset the effects of GPA on the grades…

Developing teachers' knowledge about assessing English language learners (ELLs) is critical for achieving intended policy outcomes of improving teaching under Race to the Top policy and Common Core State Standards. In addition to teachers' expressed concerns about teaching Common Core State Standards to ELLs in a national survey…

Motivated by the need to facilitate Net Generation students' information literacy (IL), or more specifically, to promote student understanding of legitimate, effective use of Web-based resources, this exploratory study investigated how analyzing, writing, posting, and monitoring Wikipedia entries might help students develop critical…

In this article, I review and discuss the work presented in this special issue while focusing on a number of issues that warrant further investigation in validation research. These issues pertain to the nature of the validation processes, the processes and mechanisms that support validation during comprehension, the factors that influence…

It is often difficult and costly to obtain individual-level student achievement data, yet, researchers are frequently reluctant to use school-level achievement data that are widely available from state websites. We argue that public-use aggregate school-level achievement data are, in fact, sufficient to address a wide range of evaluation questions…

Introduction: This paper reports on university students' experiences of learning information literacy. Method: Phenomenography was selected as the research approach as it describes the experience from the perspective of the study participants, which in this case is a mixture of undergraduate and postgraduate students studying education at an…

Introduction: Recent personal information management literature has underlined the significance of the contextuality of personal information and its use. The present article discusses the applicability of the records continuum model and its generalisation, continuum thinking, as a theoretical framework for explicating the overlap and evolution of…

Introduction: In a connected world youth are participating in digital content creating communities. This paper introduces a description of teens' information practices in digital content creating and sharing communities. Method: The research design was a constructivist grounded theory methodology. Seventeen interviews with eleven teens were…

Authors of fiction need not provide accurate accounts of the world, which might generate concern about the kinds of information people can acquire from narratives. Research has demonstrated that readers liberally encode and rely upon the information provided in fictional stories. To date, materials used to demonstrate these effects have largely…

The Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) are a networked system of 10 organizations that serve the educational needs of 10 designated regions across the United States and its territories. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is authorized by the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) to award contracts to 10 RELs to support applied research,…

Recognizing the need for information in public education, Congress mandated in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that all states create and disseminate annual school performance report cards. A decade after NCLB passed, school report cards are widely available for nearly every school in the country. As the amount of school performance data…