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This study examines the way teachers make sense of data in the context of high-stakes decision making, such as decisions related to student placement in educational tracks. Different types of data, data collected rationally and intuitively, may be used in this sensemaking process, and the same data may be interpreted in different ways by different teachers. Results show that teachers base their decisions on rational processes only to a limited extent. Teachers collect a great amount of data intuitively, and they sometimes interpret data collected rationally by personal criteria and triangulate data to a very limited extent. Since fair educational decisions are informed by a rational collection and a transparent interpretation of data, implications for theory and practice are provided.

There is an increasing expectation that school principals use data to develop and justify school policy. There is also a strong belief among a wide variety of stakeholders that the quality of decisions within the school increases in proportion to the extent to which these decisions are based on good data. In most schools, however, it appears that data use is still quite limited. Research shows that the school principal plays a key role in data use in schools. In the present study, we examine the impact of external expectations, attitude and self-efficacy on the use of data by principals. The results of a survey among 451 school principals in Flanders show that affective aspects of attitude exhibit the strongest correlation with data use by principals. The impact of cognitive attitude and self-efficacy is statistically significant, but quite limited. The same applies to the perception of external school development-orientated and accountability-orientated expectations to use data.

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