Continuous improvement (CI) methods are growing in popularity around the world as approaches to leadership and educational change. There has been particular interest in using CI methods such as collaborative data inquiry to address racial inequities in schools. But these 'wicked' problems are, in many ways, more complex and uncertain than the…

History shows that learning and collaborative inquiry are the path forward. Continuous improvement can produce great thinking and learning that enables the continuation to support the most vulnerable children. Civil rights organizers, such as Septima Clark, are viewed as model improvers. Regarded by many as the queen of the Civil Rights Movement,…

Data is ubiquitous and inseparable from the human experience. It constantly informs and transforms interactions, decisions, and understanding. If the total amount of all the data created daily was printed on paper, it would fill a library the size of 110 Libraries of Congress. As a senior research consultant for an education market research and…

Educators have long been awash in a sea of standardized test score data, with the understanding that their engagement with these data will lead to improvement in teaching and learning. But, in practice, these data have often been too infrequent, too lagging, and too distant from day-to-day practice to inform actionable next steps. To improve…

Central to the institutionalization of learning analytics is the need to understand and improve student learning. Frameworks guiding the implementation of learning analytics flow from and perpetuate specific understandings of learning. Crucially, they also provide insights into how learning analytics acknowledges and positions itself as entangled…

While there are many different types of education data, policymakers and education leaders often place heavy emphasis on data from large-scale quantitative measures, such as annual state assessments. But data from these sources alone do not provide a complete picture of learning and are often not well suited to informing improvements at the local…

Improvement networks are a relatively recent phenomenon in US education that create interorganizational networks of educators working together to improve specific educational problems. A shared emphasis of these networks is the use of data to support the improvement process, but little is known about their data use in practice. This study takes an…

School climate surveys are frequently used to collect information about student experiences in school. Less is known about how educators use survey data after survey administration. This paper explores one school district's critical use of evidence to promote equitable change. We conducted eight semi-structured interviews with district and school…

We undertook a research project consisting of four interrelated studies, in order to shed light on ways educational professionals make sense and make use of educational data in general and school performance feedback in particular. Theoretical insights illuminate why a sensemaking perspective is an appropriate and valuable lens to study data use.…

From a new institutional theoretical perspective, this article explores school actors' sense-making linked to data-based decision making (DBDM) policy in general and processes of data analysis in particular. The study revealed how actors' interpretation of and response to DBDM pointed to strong and weak couplings between and within the local…

In a time when fewer resources force school leaders to make critical decisions, the data-driven decision-making model continues to offer promise. This research project provides observations about factors used for decision making from 14 district leaders across five Iowa school districts. Placing these factors for decision making within the…

Teacher data use is often centered around standardized testing. Such data use that is commonly centered on standardized tests and used during professional development does not necessarily transform teacher practice toward equity and fails to change teacher conceptualizations of students while also perpetuating inequitable practices. Conversely,…

The Standards Assessment Inventory (SAI) has provided relevant, educator-level data helping systems of all kinds -- states, districts, schools, provinces, and organizations -- gather and track data about the professional learning their educators experience. An online, confidential, valid, and reliable instrument administered to school-based…

Evaluation is a critical component of continuous improvement in education. Robust evaluations enable engaged parties to determine program and intervention impact on key outcomes, identify areas for improvement, and guide future actions. Additionally, as educational systems increasingly focus on data-driven decisionmaking, evaluation becomes even…

When Nia Thornton became an assistant principal at Central Gwinnett High School in Georgia, one of her responsibilities was to lead professional learning for the school staff. She and the school leadership team were excited engage the staff in meaningful, day-to-day learning. They knew that their work needed to be rooted in current research and…