CTAP4 Data Assessment

While collaborative inquiry is appropriate for any content area, it is particularly relevant for mathematics and science because the process mirrors for the adults what students experience in our best mathematics and science classrooms. Data teams investigate not scientific phenomena or mathematics problems, but how to improve teaching and learning. They raise questions, examine student learning and other data, test their hypotheses, and share findings with their colleagues.

Typically, one or two teachers, one administrator, and one NSF project staff member become data facilitators for a school. They then convene school-based data teams to focus on improving mathematics and science. Sometimes team members are from the mathematics or science department or are existing grade-level teams. Other times, the team is schoolwide.

If data facilitators have only one source of data on student learning, they collect additional data such as local assessments or common grade-level and course assessments for the next data facilitator session. The process emphasizes triangulating data, using three different sources of student learning data before identifying the student learning problem. By triangulating, data facilitators guide data teams to test hunches with other data instead of drawing conclusions from a single measure.

But the good news came paired with bad as state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell declared that the education of African American students has reached a crisis stage. Scores of that group remained well below those of white and Asian American students, he said, while black students' English skills generally match those of Latino students - many of whom are just learning the language.

Schools in our country hear that data makes the difference in improving student achievement. Not all schools, however, have felt the positive impact from what they believe is data-driven decision making. The most common reason: Most school districts in this country believe they are being data-driven when they have analyzed the dickens out of their state assessment results.

1. If you're not using data to make decisions, you're flying blind.

2. This is all about a process, not a specific technology.

4. You will be spending more money, not less.

Many professional development efforts are organized as a smorgasbord of courses offered to educators. The district measures the effort's effectiveness by how many courses staff complete or how satisfied teachers are with the classes offered. District leaders who use the smorgasbord approach may view professional development as an extra that potentially helps an individual's performance but is not absolutely essential. They probably invest little in professional development planning because they don't expect great results.

Other district leaders recognize how much professional learning contributes to the district's learning goals for students, and so they align individual, team, school, and system learning plans. At each level, participants consider what outcomes they want for students, the knowledge and skills teachers need, and the professional learning that will help staff achieve the system goals. To be results-driven means following Stephen Covey's advice (1989): "Begin with the end in mind." Once student outcomes are selected, professional development leaders identify the knowledge and skills adults need to help students achieve the district's standards of success. The knowledge and skills linked to the student learning goals become part of the comprehensive professional development curriculum

In too many schools, staff development is limited to teachers attending workshops, courses, and conferences. School districts can no longer afford staff development efforts that are predominately "adult pull-out programs." That kind of learning alone will not produce high-level results. Schools will achieve high levels of performance when professional learning is embedded in every school day.

Online testing will require skills beyond those finely honed copying, collating and stapling skills we have acquired from our years of paper-and-pencil testing. Selecting the online assessment tool that works best for your school district can be facilitated by ensuring communication among all potential users of the application from the beginning of the selection process.

While online testing shares many of the same preparation requirements as traditional paper-based tests, they now take different forms. Rather than making sure you have enough printed copies of a test, an evaluation of the viability of online testing should involve a review of a district’s ability to provide for sufficient online access within the schedule for administration. For example, based on the number of computers and the network load, how many students can take the assessment during an exam period? Does the software restrict the number of concurrent users? Teachers likely will want the ability to create multiple forms of the test for security within the test administration. Can the application easily provide for this function?  

Further, the use of computers for online testing necessitates that students and teachers are already comfortable with using this technology as a regular part of daily instruction. Focused professional development on the usage of the application as well as what to do if things go awry will help the transition for staff. Issues to address could include what to do if a student needs to change an answer after a section of the testing is complete, how are unique log-ins provided for the students or if there is a technical problem during an administration can students resume where they were in the test.

Harnessing more powerful data tools and greater amounts of data.

Granting teacher, parent and community access to data

Planning and utilizing interoperability standards

In this post I hope to share the essence of some of the main ideas communicated in the speech. The format is: words from the slide followed by a short narrative on the core message of the slide. Hope you find it useful.

The biggest challenge in our current environment is that it is trivial to implement a tool, it takes five minutes. But tools are limiting and can just give us data. What compounds the challenge is that we all have this deep tendency to make decisions that come from who we are influenced from our life experiences. Based on my humble experience of the last few years here are seven common sense recommendations for creating a data driven company culture……

# 6 Reporting is not Analysis