Data Driven Decision Making

Data is the essence of all decision making not only in K-12 but in the corporate and consumer spending world as well. Data is used to make budgeting, purchasing, and curricular decisions each day in schools across the country. As teachers begin to get into the world of data analysis, we are asking them to look deeper at data to help make decisions about what the teaching priorities should be in their classrooms. In the classroom, data can be used to determine whether students are meeting the standards and are mastering content. If students are not grasping content, then as educators we must ask ourselves, how are we altering instruction or applying interventions to ensure that we are reaching all learners. What do these interventions look like and how it may differentiate for each student is the real question that needs to be answered. Interventions begin in the classroom and as teachers start to realize where the gaps are in instruction, most will re-focus and apply strategies to help students mast the content. There are many free and easy to use tools that will support teachers in the data collection and analysis process. A few of those tools being used in our district are Google Forms and Edulastic. The teachers using Google Forms were able to link questions to standards and just by assessing students using the forms. The teachers were given detailed charts that show which items the students struggle on and what questions were commonly missed. The real power lies in the ability for teachers to talk to their grade level peers about the common exams and student performance, and also having the powerful conversations about the instructional approaches they used in one class over another. Education is a two-way journey, the students learn from the teachers and the teachers learn from the students. Valuable, student-performance data can provide teachers with information about what works and what does not work in their instructional approaches.