In the past decade, school districts and states have spent more than a billion dollars to build and implement data systems about student learning. They will probably spend another billion in the next five years.
According to Education Sector Managing Director Bill Tucker, “The rhetoric around educational data is compelling: With better data, policymakers can identify effective schools and educators, expose problems, make better decisions about the allocation of resources, and build political will for reform. At the classroom level, better data will inform instruction — enabling teachers to better understand what approaches work for specific students — and lead to better teaching and improved learning.”
Tucker lists five design principles for improving data use:
1. From institutional to learner centered data.
2. Information flows across institutions.
3. Usefulness and usability driven adoption.
4. Common, open systems.
5. Get the right data.
Data Quality Campaign reports that 10 states have met the 10 fundamental State Actions that changes the culture of how data are used in schools to inform educational decisions and thus to improve system and student performance. Check out how far your state has progressed toward establishing these conditions in order to meet the Five Design Principles.
These are impressive public policy implementation steps. Yet, they do not answer the primary questions that efficient instruction answers: “How do people learn?” and “How closely do lessons address these ways?”
So, I will continue developing aLEAP (a Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm), so that individual learners in or out of school anywhere may automatically identify efficient instruction with their Tablet PCs.
Does that seem reasonable to you also, and more beneficial for learners?
Heiny, R. aLEAP Toward Automatic Learning Analysis with Tablet PCs . Posted by The Tablet PC In Education Blog, August 07, 2009 at 3:54 AM. (Retrieved March 8, 2010, 4:44 PM.)
Data Quality Campaign, 2009-10 Survey Results by State, ND. (Retrieved March 8, 2010, 4:10 PM.)
Tucker, B. Five Design Principles for Smarter Education Data Systems, The Quick and the Ed, March 8, 2010. (Retrieved March 8, 2010, 4:15 PM.)