2023 Reports

Education Leadership Data Analytics (ELDA) 2023 Conference Program

Bowers, Alex

Education Leadership Data Analytics (ELDA) is the emerging domain of research, practice, and policy in PK-12 education that focuses on bringing together four broad domains at the intersection of 1) Education Leadership, 2) Evidence Based Improvement Cycles, 3) Data Science, 4) and Equity-centered data practices. The Education Leadership Data Analytics 2023 Conference (#ELDA2023) at Teachers College, Columbia University is designed to bring together educators and administrators with research leaders and innovators working at the intersections of individual overlaps of two or more of these four circles in the Venn diagram. The ELDA 2023 Conference is designed to bring participants together across a wide variety of fields in education who work collaboratively with or within schools and districts, know how to facilitate and lead capacity building conversations with educators using evidence and data to build trust and collaboration, and work with data through open access code, analytics, data science, data visualizations and dashboards, data mining and machine learning, and statistics.

The ELDA 2023 Conference was held on Friday, June 23, 2023 at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. This document is the ELDA 2023 conference program.

ELDA2023 consisted of a set of engaging speakers and panels in the morning and then transitioned to afternoon concurrent paper sessions and an innovative data visualization and dashboard expo. Throughout these exciting sessions, participants networked and collaborated around the central issues of the research, training and capacity-building questions that are central to the field to engage schools, districts, and education system leaders in evidence-based improvement cycles informed by data analytics, data science, and equity-focused engagement with communities and stakeholders around their data, data visualizations, Instructional Data Warehouses (IDWs), machine learning, and recommendation and pattern analytic systems.

PK-12 schools and districts collect and display ever increasing amounts and types of data for educators to use to inform instructional improvement. The range of data and dashboards is vast, zooming in on student data including test scores, grades, interim assessments, attendance, behavior, as well as new forms of intelligent tutoring, learning analytics, and learning system management data and meta-data, or zooming out to teacher, principal, and school-level data including school climate, trust, data-use, academic press, and community engagement among many others. Yet, to date there is an increasing need noted across the research and practice literature to bring together these many different data sources to provide relevant and actionable information for decision making by not only by administrators, but also teachers, parents, the community, and ultimately, students, in an effort to inform evidence-based continuous improvement cycles focused on instruction and student and organizational success. This work at this intersection, known as Education Leadership Data Analytics (ELDA), is defined as:

"ELDA practitioners work collaboratively with schooling system leaders and teachers to analyze, pattern, and visualize previously unknown patterns and information from the vast sets of data collected by schooling organizations, and then integrate findings in easy to understand language and digital tools into collaborative and community building evidence-based improvement cycles with stakeholders" (Bowers et al, 2019, p.8).

Ultimately, this work of ELDA focuses on the work at the intersection of Education Leadership, Evidence-Based Improvement Cycles, Data Science, and Equity.