Data use in Italian schools: a qualitative study of how schools enact an increasingly institutionalized policy

• In Event: Global Education Reforms Across Time and Space: Tendencies, Drivers, and Explanations In Comparative and Historical Perspective (Part 2)

Proposal

Expectations for schools to use data from a variety of sources to improve the education they offer have been increasing globally (Verger & Skedsmo, 2021), alongside the global diffusion of School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA) policies (Verger, Parcerisa, and Fontdevila, 2018). Over time, what data is and means has expanded beyond standardized national large-scale assessments. In the Italian SAWA, as in other contexts, schools’ own analysis and reflection about data both received from central administration and produced locally are expected to be used for didactic and organizational improvement. In this research, schools’ use of internally and externally produced data of organizational, administrative, assessment, pedagogic nature and beyond is analyzed. These include national tests, schools’ self-evaluation reports, grades, teacher observation, demographic data, and more.

Research on data use in the Italian context is relatively limited. Specifically, no research has been conducted following the conceptualization of data going beyond national assessment data. Pastori and Pagani (2016) report growing trust in the validity of data from national assessments results, but difficulty in making use of it because of time, skills necessary to analyze data, and lack of habit in engaging in such processes.

This research seeks to understand to what extent and how data use processes and routines happen in Italian schools, what facilitates them, what schools consider as data and their attitudes towards it. It analyzes how school organizational and political context, individual factors, and the accountability system mediate data use, and whether and how data influences pedagogical and organizational decisions in schools. The study places the analysis within an understanding of where data use is policy time-wise, that is in terms of institutionalization, and whether it seems to be sticking after having been adopted (Colyvas and Jonsson, 2011), or if its abandonment is impending or the conditions for it being developed. The perception and judgment of the institutionalization, or alternatively, frailty, of policies of data use by school actors called to enact them, participate in how data use is realized on the ground.

This research embraces an understanding of policies as being enacted, that is made sense of and reconfigured, rather than neutrally implemented, by local actors with agency (Ball et al., 2012). The study uses data use conceptualizations and frameworks (Coburn and Turner, 2011; Spillane, 2012) to study data use in education in a specific Southern-European low-stakes accountability context and embraces the notion of data-informed decision making rather than data-based decision making (Schildkamp et al., 2019). Methodologically, this qualitative study uses interviews of principals and teachers, and school documents analysis in 8 schools, each comprising both primary and lower-secondary education level, selected to guarantee variety in socio-economic context, in the city of Rome. Expected results include limited structured use of data, positive attitudes regarding conceptualization of data beyond national assessment results, organizational and data literacy barriers for data use. It is also anticipated that ideas of data use include data use to increase equity, but that processes for this to happen may not be structured or systematically present.

Author

• Giulia Montefiore, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona