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Chasing Clues: Identifying The First Homecoming, Laurel Bowen

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Education Policy Research In The Big Data Era: Methodological Frontiers, Misconceptions, And Challenges, Yinying Wang

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

Despite abundant data and increasing data availability brought by technological advances, there has been very limited education policy studies that have capitalized on big data—characterized by large volume, wide variety, and high velocity. Drawing on the recent progress of using big data in public policy and computational social science research, this commentary discusses how to approach big data and how big data can be used in education policy research. First, I introduce big data that is potentially relevant to education policy research. I then present methodological frontiers by examining the assumptions, key concepts, merits, and caveats of three commonly used …

The Georgia Seal Of Biliteracy: Exploring The Nexus Of Politics And Language Education, Tim Jansa, Kristina Brezicha

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

On May 3, 2016, House Bill (HB) 879—the Georgia Seal of Biliteracy—was signed into law by Governor Nathan Deal and went into effect on July 1, 2016. Outside of the language education sphere, many educators and policymakers may not fully understand the benefits of studying other languages. Yet, this policy hinges on the utility of simultaneously demonstrating proficiency in a foreign language and an advanced command of English, thus forming the foundation of biliteracy. This article provides an overview of the political landscape in Georgia as it pertains to language education and analyzes how lawmakers translated the issues at hand …

The Social Networks And Paradoxes Of The Opt-Out Movement Amid The Common Core State Standards Implementation, Yinying Wang

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

Opting out of state standardized tests has recently become a movement—a series of grassroots, organized efforts to refuse to take high-stakes state standardized tests. In particular, the opt-out rates in the state of New York reached 20% in 2015 and 21% in 2016. This study aims to illustrate the social networks and examine the paradoxes that have propelled the opt-out movement in New York—the movement’s epicenter with the highest opt-out rate in the United States. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of social movement theory, social network theory, and policy paradox, this study compiled the opt-out corpus by using the data …

Altering The Traditional American History Landscape: Incorporating Culturally Relevant Biographies In Social Studies, Aubrey Southall, Chara H. Bohan

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

The purpose of this article is to provide guidance to teachers on how to incorporate Latinx culturally relevant biographies into their social studies classrooms with English learners (ELs). In the social studies curriculum, United States history often is regarded as one of the hardest courses for newly arrived immigrants to learn due to the unfamiliarity of American history content (Dunne & Martell, 2013). Using a culturally relevant approach to teaching social studies has the potential to connect EL students to content in powerful and meaningful ways. As the number of Spanish speaking EL students grows in the American public school …

Common Core State Standards On Twitter: Public Sentiment And Opinion Leaders, Yinying Wang, David J. Fikis

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to examine the public opinion on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on Twitter. Using Twitter API, we collected the tweets containing the hashtags #CommonCore and #CCSS for 12 months from 2014 to 2015. A Common Core corpus was created by compiling all the collected 660,051 tweets. The results of sentiment analysis suggest Twitter users expressed overwhelmingly negative sentiment towards the CCSS in all 50 states. Five topic clusters were detected by cluster analysis of the hashtag co-occurrence network. We also found that most of the opinion leaders were those who expressed negative sentiment …

Automated Text Data Mining Analysis Of Five Decades Of Educational Leadership Research Literature: Probabilistic Topic Modeling Of Eaq Articles From 1965 To 2014, Yinying Wang, Alex J. Bowers, David J. Fikis

Educational Policy Studies Faculty Publications

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to describe the underlying topics and the topic evolution in the 50-year history of educational leadership research literature.

Methods: We used automated text data mining with probabilistic latent topic models to examine the full text of the entire publication history of all 1,539 articles published in Educational Administration Quarterly from 1965 to 2014. Given the computationally intensive data analysis required by probabilistic topic models, relying on high performance computing, we used a 10-fold cross validation to estimate the model in which we categorized each article in each year into one of 19 …