Data in Practice: Conceptualizing the Data-Based Decision-Making Phenomena

• In Event: The Practice of Data Use

Abstract

“Data use” and “data based decision-making” are increasingly popular mantras in educational policy discourses. Policymakers place tremendous faith in the power of data to transform practice, but the fate of policymakers’ efforts will depend in great measure on the very practice they hope to move. In most conversations about data use, however, relations between data and practice have been under-conceptualized. In this paper I identify and discuss some conceptual tools for studying data in practice by drawing on work in various theoretical traditions. I explore some ways in which we might frame a research agenda in order to investigate data in everyday practice in schools and other organizations in the education sector. My account is centered on work practice in the schoolhouse, but the conceptual apparatus I describe can be applied to practice in other organizations in the education sector and indeed to inter-organizational practice as well.

Author

• James P. Spillane, Northwestern University