Illuminations and Insights

In this blog, Senior Research Analyst Abhijeet Ball discusses his role as a research analyst at EA, what skills he utilizes in his position, his favorite projects he's worked at EA, what he does for fun outside of work, and more.

At Education Analytics (EA), we enjoy collaborating with our staff and partner organizations to write blogs that discuss the current challenges and successes in education and data spaces and work at EA. In this blog, we reflect on this past year, highlight our five most popular blogs of 2023, and look forward to what 2024 holds for EA.

Data interoperability is poised to radically transform educational research by making work with educational data less costly but more efficient, scalable, and actionable. In our latest blog, EA’s CEO Andrew Rice highlights 10 questions that researchers could answer more meaningfully, more accurately, and more quickly when using interoperable data streams. The blog describes how interoperability is on the cusp of revolutionizing educational research by effortlessly bringing together data from different sources, allowing statistical research outputs to live in real time, and turning rigorous research into actionable, operational systems for educators.

In pursuit of our mission to use data and evidence to help close opportunity gaps for the most vulnerable and historically marginalized students, EA applied for and received a research grant from the K12 Research for Equity Hub to explore how accountability systems can better promote equity in schools and districts. In this blog, we examine the benefits and challenges of bringing together our knowledge of predictive analytics and early warning systems to transform these accountability systems into transformational data systems for school improvement.

We analyzed data from K-12 public schools funded by NewSchools Venture Fund to examine longitudinal changes in students’ social-emotional learning (SEL) and school culture/climate (CC) survey measures, along with academic growth. In this blog, we summarize findings of our exploration of whether SEL and CC served as a protective factor against academic learning lag during COVID-19.

How do we help foster teacher innovation? In this blog, we highlight how an exciting new software application paired with a model for teacher action research enables teachers to identify evidence-based instructional strategies, test them out in their classroom, and use data to determine if they really make a difference in student achievement.