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What Should We Do With All This Data?
Measure twice, cut… never?
Teachers can do a lot of things. We are experts on our subject. We are caretakers for our students. We are therapists when students need extra support. We are bosses with hundreds of employees. We are data managers and analyzers. If you need a job done, a teacher can handle it.
Part of our job is to understand what our students can do and what our students might still need help with. We give students a pre-assessment before a unit. We collect and grade practice problems. We record how much a student has learned through each activity. We create and score a summative assessment at the end of a unit to see where we might need to reteach. We make beautiful spreadsheets to explain our students' growth. We give district and state-mandated tests to compare students to other students. We have so much data! But what do we do with it? A whole lotta nothin'.
Why do we care about data in the first place?
We live in the information age. Data is big business. Not only is it a fun buzzword to throw around to make a school district sound corporate, but data is big bucks for educational research companies.
For example, My district requires all of our students to complete I-Ready testing, a standardized-style test that…
