Within the past week or so, I’ve encountered two people who have purposefully distinguished between being “data driven” and “data informed.” First, Rick Saporta differentiates these two approaches in his recent presentation on business data strategy. And second, Tiankai Feng situates both “data informed” and “data driven” decision making
I was reading an evaluation of a digital learning platform (Imagine Math) the other day, and I came across this graph: The point of this post isn’t to talk about Imagine Math or whether it’s a good product or how teachers should incorporate it into their math instruction.
Programming note: I’m back after a long summer hiatus. I honestly just kind of lost motivation to do weekly posts. So, moving forward, I’m not going to promise weekly posts. I’ll shoot for a 1 or 2 times a month, or whenever something strikes me that I
Last week, I gave a talk titled “Data Management Tips for Educators” at the 2025 MERC Summit. For those who don’t live in the Richmond metropolitan area – or for those who do but don’t know about MERC – MERC is the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium. It’s a partnership
I gave a presentation at yesterday’s 2025 Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC) Summit titled “Data Management Tips for Educators.” The slides are available here if you’re interested. The gist of my talk is that we, as educators, often have lots of data available to us, whether that’s
I recently read this article on the Ludicity blog about the narrative fallacy, and it got me thinking about how this applies to education. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, the narrative fallacy is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, The
And we're back from a 3-week hiatus that was the result of a guys' trip, being busy, and being somewhat demotivated. But now we're back! Most of my job in late spring and early summer of every year involves analyzing data from standardized tests, and
Stacked bar charts aren’t good plots, and this is a hill I will die on. Even though everyone over the age of, say, 7, has seen a stacked bar chart at some point in their lives and probably intuits what they are and how to describe them, I’ll
This week's post is going to be pretty short. Over the past week, I've had interactions with two different groups of "AI-in -education experts," and they each left me feeling some combination of despair, disgust, incredulity, and anger. And so I wrote what was
I’ve mentioned in multiple posts on this blog that the primary “point” of data is to help inform decisions. There are probably occasions where it’s useful to just report out on broad compliance-y things, or where we want to explore data with no clear decision in mind in
I’ve been very much into the Acquired podcast lately. The premise of the podcast is that each episode describes a single company, usually beginning at some pivotal pre-company occurrence (the birth of the founder, the invention of some critical piece of technology that enables the company, etc) and proceeding
I recently stumbled onto a preprint research article examining the writing quality of college students before and after the introduction of ChatGPT, as well as some reporting on the same article published on the Hechinger Report. And oh boy did reading it make me feel like Will Ferrell in Zoolander.