BCC Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

The PIs of this project from Ohio State University expand the community of users of the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive (OLDA) as they develop a shared interdisciplinary research platform across multiple universities and local and state agencies. The PIs, one of whom is the director of the Ohio Education Research Center and the other is the director of the Center for Human Resource Research, assemble, document and disseminate previously isolated agency datasets through an integrated data warehouse. They are augmenting the current cross-agency data stewards advisory committee to bring researchers and agency stakeholders together to determine research agendas that will address important state and local educational questions. The project establishes the legal agreements that facilitate access to the data, match and integrate multiple forms of data, improve the technical accessibility and usability of data, and connect with researchers and organizations in other states that are pursuing similar goals to make cross-state comparisons easier to produce. A training process to bring new graduate students and local and state agencies together with university researchers facilitates the integration of data to inform problems of policy and practice. The federal government has made substantial investments in the infrastructure of data into longitudinal data systems, but the integration of these data across agencies and the development of human capital to use these data have lagged. The project expands the infrastructure in Ohio to conduct data-intensive research by developing an open portal that allows researchers to examine data archive documentation and codebooks to assess whether the data meet their research needs. The portal provides the structure that researchers can use to gain permission to use and securely access data. The project connects to multiple national efforts that support the use of data in education. The PIs have a focus on the use of longitudinal data systems to address important issues in STEM education, such as the impact of STEM schools and the persistence of young STEM researchers in postdoctoral experiences.