“We Have All the Data in One Place”: Examining Principals’ Use of a Data Warehouse During an Academic School Year

Abstract

In this article, I describe how principals accessed teacher and student data on a centralized data warehouse (DWH) during an academic school year. I found that principals did not use the DWH very often during the year. When logged on, principals most often looked at reports on student achievement, teachers’ performance, or student demographics. Principals’ use also seemed to be influenced by the school calendar and the release of student and teacher data, along with personal and organizational characteristics.

Editorial: Exploring classroom assessment practices and teacher decision-making

“…However, despite the strong pressure for teachers to use assessment information to inform instructional decisions, major drawbacks are reported in the literature. These include the capacity of teachers to translate information into insights (Datnow and Hubbard, 2015), the amount of time and onerous preparation needed (Datnow et al, 2021), equity concerns (Dodman et al, 2021), access and availability of various kinds of data (Kallemeyn, 2014), and data system design and construction (Drake, 2021). There are also decisions as to which type of information can best support teacher decision-making with differing understandings of what constitutes assessment information, some considering only the system-level data generated through standardized testing to be rigorous enough to provide insights to inform teacher practice.…”