Building the Culture of Inquiry-Based Data Use: Program Quality Continuous Improvement Project

• In Event: Striving for Continuous Program Improvement: Teacher Education Programs Explore Their Data Practices

Abstract

Moving toward systemic data use transformation takes vision, commitment, and action. There must be infrastructure in place to create a culture of data use practices as collaborative research for program development, and continuous improvement as their focus. Efforts grounded in collaboration provide for authentic use of data and increases stakeholder engagement in the process of program improvement (Cuthrell & Lys, 2014).

The Graduate School of Education (GSE), the largest in the Touro College Division of Graduate Studies, is dedicated to excellence in education for a rapidly changing education environment in a knowledge-based economy. To provide school districts and other educational agencies with highly professional and competent teachers, administrators, and educational personnel, every effort is made to maximize the quality of our programs. To this end, the School aims to strengthen its internal systems for supporting the high performance of both students, staff, and faculty. To actualize this goal, they are fortunate to be among 21 University-School Partnership for the Renewal of Educator Preparation (USPREP) coalition members.

The USPREP related transformational activities included a self-study or inquiry project with a focus on data use to inform decision making, which Touro entitled the Program Quality Continuous Improvement Institutional Inquiry Project (QCIIIP). The QCIIIP project explored to what extent Touro GSE programs developed a shared understanding around data and data use, and to what extent GSE programs established clear procedures to collect, organize, and analyze evidence for the purposes of program improvement.
Research Questions
The following research questions guided the inquiry:
1. What processes and procedures are aligned with evidence-based programmatic decision-making at Touro GSE?
2. What Touro GSE evidence informs decision making and quality continuous improvement?
3. To what extent does evidence-based programmatic decision-making cultivate a culture of institutional learning.
The Touro GSE Quality Continuous Institutional Inquiry Project was a mixed–method project designed to build the explanation of the evidence used for the purpose of improving the graduate programs in teacher education, school leadership, and school counseling. The data collection and data analysis processes were concurrent and spanned over a one-month timeframe.
Data collection was done in three phases (survey, individual interviews, focus group interviews) and merged with data analysis to produce some common themes.

In the findings the argument is presented that Touro College GSE has a plethora of data sources and available data, however, with limited access and analytical skills, the data appear useless to inform program improvement. While all stakeholders recognized the importance of data to the decision-making process, they acknowledged not having enough time to commit to deciphering the raw data presented. When assessing the institution’s data use practices through the lens of the Dean for Impact tool, the conclusion drawn was that we were emerging across all indicators and continued professional development is needed to develop a culture of learning.

Authors

• Elina Lampert-Shepel, Touro University

• Ruth A. Best, Touro College