There's an abundance of standardized tests these days, and an equal abundance of confusion from test-wise, results-foolish districts that aren't quite sure how to use all that data. A town-gown collaboration aims to correct that, as Boston school district employees and Harvard faculty and students team up to write the book on using assessments wisely:
Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning will be published by the Harvard Education Press in November. All royalties from the book will go to the education school to work with the 58,300-student Boston public schools. The book grew out of a yearlong workshop designed to help the district’s teachers and administrators learn ways of making more productive use of student test results and other data.Posted by kswygert at April 27, 2005 11:17 AMExperts say the book’s partnership between researchers and educators could help bridge the gaps that exist between testing and instruction...
At the start of the school year, educators often describe feeling overwhelmed by the amount of data and where to dive in...So the workshop and the forthcoming book are structured around an “improvement cycle,” with the tools to use at each step along the way.
While the process might look different in different schools, the cycle helps educators: identify patterns in data; choose key issues to investigate; dig deeper into multiple data sources; agree on a problem and explore its causes; examine current classroom practices; draw up a plan to change those practices; carry out that plan; and then assess the results of those actions.