The Southeast Comprehensive Center (SECC) at SEDL, an affiliate of American Institutes for Research (AIR), partnered with the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) in 2014 to assist in evaluating Alabama Plan 2020, mainly focusing on learners and the graduation rate. SECC provided professional development and analytic technical assistance on evaluation statistical techniques to ALSDE research and development staff and later codeveloped the data primer in the process so that staff would have a record and instructional manual of the technical assistance provided. Development of this guide was part of SECC's work on two projects, Alabama Plan 2020 Indicators: Grade 3 Literacy and Mathematics (which concluded in December 2016) and Alabama Low-Performing Schools (which concluded September 2019). To assess whether students would graduate on time and college- and career-ready, ALSDE staff, with support from SECC, learned and utilized multiple regression as a methodological approach to predict the success of Plan 2020. Using this approach, ALSDE was able to use extant or existing school-level data (e.g., rate of free and reduced-price lunch, number of counselors per 100 students, and average daily attendance) to predict the state's graduation rate. Using the above analysis as examples, the goal of the data primer is to provide an approach to addressing key research and evaluation questions in education. More specifically, the data primer is designed to enhance understanding and use of data to develop regression models for assessing school progress on the Plan 2020 priorities. The data primer is organized into three sections, "Cleaning and Merging Data," "Analyzing Data," and "Presenting Data," each offering step-by-step instructions. [This report was co-produced by Alabama State Department of Education's Research & Development office.]