The PIs of this proposal are developing a collaborative community to support data-intensive research in education regionally in the Silicon Valley, California. A team of researchers in education, the social sciences and engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz have engaged in a partnership with researchers from the National Laboratory for Educational Transformation, a private non-profit organization. The collaborative team is structuring a network of other regional agencies to expand capacity around four challenges: cultural, legal and regulatory issues that prevent sharing data across institutions, analytical approaches, technical infrastructure issues to integrate and manage the data set, and ethical issues including data security and privacy. Regional stakeholders from public agencies and the private sector are coming together with the researchers in five meetings over the course of the year to expand the scope of research that can be addressed with the multiple datasets that are being integrated.
As the states develop more sophisticated longitudinal data systems, the need to increased collaboration and interoperability becomes more important. This project develops a model of such collaboration from a regional perspective to expand on data available from the state longitudinal data systems and to incorporate local data from a number of agencies. This collaboration also addresses more than just the coordination of data and identification of research agendas with an additional emphasis on analytical approaches. The work in this project expands the efforts on the part of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources to strengthen the relationship between STEM education researchers and the state, regional, and local longitudinal data system. The project connects to multiple national efforts that support the use of data in education with the work of the Regional Education Laboratories. It also connects to other state and national efforts.
