Aligning Design with Partnership Goals: Transforming Teacher Data Use with Asset-based Analytics

• In Event: Making the Invisible Visible: Dynamics, Processes, and Outcomes of Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

We report on a research practice partnership (RPP) with a large urban school district with the goal of making visible students funds of knowledge and shifting teacher’s instructional focus toward student assets. We show how we aligned the goals of our partnership with the design of an AI-powered reflection system and data dashboard. Then, we share emergent outcomes of the RPP and describe how teachers engage with asset-based student data. The structure of RPPs enables us to engage with the organizational goals, needs, and cultural dynamics of partners (Farrell et al 2022, Ahn et al. 2019). However, awareness of a partner organization does not prescribe how to design in alignment with the broader goals and values of a partner. We draw from design based implementation research traditions to integrate partnership needs with theoretically grounded learning perspectives as a way to design within and for organizational systems (Fishman et al. 2013). These perspectives inform how we evaluate our designs, and the need to make visible the connections between design decisions and the aspects of an RPP. Data consists of two years of bi-weekly partnership meetings and 14 focus groups with over 100 educators from our partner. We will make visible how the design of our AI-system was realized through discussions with our district partners and a negotiation of the goals of the RPP. We took an inductive approach toward focus group transcripts, discovering emergent data use approaches taken up by teachers.A key design decision made by our RPP was deviating from quantitative metrics measuring student’s funds of knowledge and deciding to foreground data to be insightful and actionable. One choice was to design our AI analysis to produce descriptive outputs: “emerging,” “progressing,” and “excelling” around students’ skills versus quantitative scores. Presenting teachers with this data was an intentional choice to push teachers away from the type of data-use practices commonly observed when teachers engage with quantitative performance data. Our RPP conjectured that if we presented data in traditional ways it would lead to traditional data use practice. This decision has shaped how we approach professional learning and communication around the work of our RPP, pushing us to be transparent about the intentions behind the design decision to teachers. We found that deviating from traditional forms of data, and presenting teachers descriptive asset-based data has transformed how educators use data. We have seen teachers commonly take up what we call an “asset-awareness” approach, where teachers go to data with the intention of identifying students strengths and seeking ways to help students become aware of the assets they bring to the classroom. We also have observed a “community” approach, where teachers analyze data with the goal of identifying connections between students interests and the local community in order to develop culturally relevant activities. This study illustrates a case of designing within alignment of an RPPs broader context and goals and shares an example of examining outcomes of design decisions.

Authors

• Seth Van Doren, University of California - Irvine

• Abril Gomez, University of California Irvine

• Karmelyn Macias, University of California - Irvine

• June Ahn, University of California - Irvine