Understanding Data-Use Practices Among Teachers: The Contribution of Microprocess Studies

• In Event: The Practice of Data Use

Abstract

Compared with the growing volume of macro-level accounts of data use systems or data use activities in which teachers engage, micro-process studies —investigations of what teachers and others actually do under the broad banner of “data use” or “evidence-based decision making” — remain relatively under-developed. A few studies attend to the practices employed by teachers as they analyze and interpret student data in a range of professional development and workplace contexts, supplying a useful precedent for empirical work. Starting with a review of this extant research, the paper argues for a more conceptually robust, methodologically sophisticated, and extensive program of micro-process research on data use that also anticipates the ways in which local practice both instantiates and constructs macro-level institutional and organizational structures, processes and logics.

Author

• Judith Warren Little, University of California - Berkeley