With an upward trend in big data, public sectors and private organizations have widely accepted using data as the basis of policy evaluation and decision-making.
As a result, through large-scale data analysis, decision-makers can examine and interpret the patterns and orders of various phenomena from a comprehensive, long-term, and macro perspective. Moreover, researchers analyze current situations, predict tendency, and improve decision-making quality with better knowledge.
"Evidence-based decision-making policy" has become an important concept and trend in developed countries. Western countries have long observed social phenomena through administrative data. Nowadays, numerous countries have started using large-scale and diverse amounts of data in business, medicine, news, politics, finance, and taxation. Education, with its emphasis on talent cultivation, is one of the focuses in the current database development.
In Taiwan, the existing education-related databases are respectively established by universities or education bureau and department in cities. However, those current databases left something to be desired in understanding ongoing situations and difficulties of education development, improving the education environment, cultivating future talents, providing suggestions, and supporting for education policies in Taiwan. Therefore, these independent databases has faced several challenges:
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The current databases are dispersed across different public sectors without wide ranging.
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There are numerous problem because data is not clearly defined, regularly update, is hard to align with global development.
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It is challenging to concatenate the data with the discrepancy between those existing education-related databases belonging to different sectors. Thus, it takes much work to observe, analyze, and give full play to the functions that the database should have.
It is imperative to establish a national-level and integrated educational database to keep pace with the rapidly developing society. Though National Education Research Data Archive(NERDA) efficiently use these data and evidence-based policy tools maintain educational policy up-to-date.