"Close on the heels of federal efforts to prod states to build and make use of new systems for collecting longitudinal data on students, the Spencer Foundation is rolling out an interesting new grant program that is designed to ask hard questions about what exactly educators are going to do wiith all the data they collect.
Says the foundation:
Educators in K-12 and higher education nationwide are being called to use data and to adopt data-driven decision making as a tool to improve their practices and ultimately to improve student outcomes. ... Yet there is limited, if any, inquiry on what might actually work in these different settings and why. This leaves educators drowning in data and high expectations that improvement will follow without helping them develop a better sense of how to use these data for improvement purposes.'"
Says the foundation:
Educators in K-12 and higher education nationwide are being called to use data and to adopt data-driven decision making as a tool to improve their practices and ultimately to improve student outcomes. ... Yet there is limited, if any, inquiry on what might actually work in these different settings and why. This leaves educators drowning in data and high expectations that improvement will follow without helping them develop a better sense of how to use these data for improvement purposes.'"