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Data in Practice: Conceptualizing the Data-Based Decision-Making Phenomena
Abstract
"Data use" and "data-based decision making" are increasingly popular mantras in public policy discourses and texts. Policy makers place tremendous faith in the power of data to transform practice, but the fate of policy makers' 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 essay, I identify and discuss some conceptual and analytical tools for studying data in practice by drawing on work from 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. My account is centered on schoolhouse work practice, but the research apparatus I consider can be applied to practice in other organizations in the education sector and indeed to interorganizational practice, a critical consideration in the education sector.
... Collaboration is a concept that is strongly dependent on the context in which it is embedded (Datnow et al., 2013;Kelchtermans, 2006;Little, 2012;Spillane, 2012;Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallace, & Thomas, 2006). Therefore, a universal definition of the concept is not readily available. ...
Research considers collaboration to be a significant factor in terms of how teachers use data to improve their practice. Nevertheless, the effects of teacher collaboration with regard to teachers' individual data use has remained largely underexplored. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the interplay between collaboration and the personal factors that influence teachers' data use. This paper addresses this research gap by defining factors that affect collaboration, and by investigating the impact of collaboration on teachers' individual data use. The resulting research questions were answered by drawing on questionnaire data from 1,472 primary and secondary school teachers in Flanders. The findings indicate that collaboration is the main explanatory factor for tea-chers' individual data use compared to teachers' self-efficacy and attitude. Therefore, this study demonstrates the value of collaboration for future research and for creating a supportive environment for teachers' individual data use.
... The capacity of measures to function as meaningful windows is also tied to organizational routines and structures around data use, as data's meaning requires contextualized interpretation. The frequency with which data is examined, sense of psychological safety in doing so, and availability of supports for collective sensemaking influence the extent to which stakeholders can understand, accept, and deduce appropriate implications from measurement data (Bertrand & Marsh, 2015;Datnow & Hubbard, 2015;Spillane, 2012 ...
In this paper, we build on a growing body of research on practical measurement for educational improvement, contributing a conceptualization of the organizational functions of measurement in processes of persistence and change. Our work is grounded in theoretical understandings of micro‐institutional change that foreground processes of reproduction and disruption of organizational categories, priorities, assumptions, and practices. Drawing together measurement discourses from multiple fields of study, we identify four metaphors for organizational functions that measures can serve: carriers, windows, exercises, and drivers. We propose a conceptual framework illustrating relationships and pathways among these functions as they operate in context. We then apply the framework in the context of co‐designing three practical measures of science teacher learning in a large urban district, illustrating varied pathways through which the practical measures seemed to function, and documenting their respective affordances and constraints in driving reproduction and/or disruption in the organization's work to support science teacher learning. This line of work extends prior research on practical measurement through its focus on measures of science teacher learning and its attention to how practical measures can function to shape broader processes of organizational transformation and stability. This paper is part of the special issue on Teacher Learning and Practice within Organizational Contexts.
... BDAC has technological (tangible) and firm (intangible) abilities, which are important enablers for "datadriven decision-making (DDDM)." So, DDDM is not only a channel but also a processing system of information that can be helpful for leaders to take decisions (Spillane 2012). According to (Kiron et al. 2014;Wamba et al. 2017) researchers motioned BDAC significantly impacts that firm performance as an outcome of DDDM insights. ...
The current study aimed to explain the effect of big data analytics capabilities on firm performance in the telecommunication sector of Pakistan. The proposed research model examines the effect of big data analytics capabilities on firm performance in the presence of chain mediating effect of data integration capability and data-driven decision-making, along with moderating influence of analytics culture. The research model was developed using the proven theory of resource-based view. In this cross-sectional study, an online questionnaire was used including 34 response items for data collection, whereas SPSS and Smart-PLS 4.0 were used for descriptive statistics & inferential analysis respectively. The results of this study indicate that adoption of big data analytics capabilities positively influence firm performance. It also confirms about the effective implementation of data driven decision making & data integration capability leads to better performance of the organization. However, no moderation of analytics culture on firm performance was found. The results also suggest the managers to take effective decision-making based on data integration for enhancing business performance. Study faces some potential challenges due to high data volume availability, small sample size methodological and sector specifics limitations. Study suggests the potential for future research evaluating this model with two serial mediations like process-oriented dynamic capabilities, business process agility etc. along with some moderators such as customer knowledge management etc. to identify the response in more complicated connections.
... Unfortunately, educational change is often not sustainable (Askel-Williams & Koh, 2020; Cohen & Mehta, 2017). Changes to education are complex, dynamic, and emerge through interactions in context (Spillane, 2012). Rapid digital, economic, and societal changes lead to complex problems that are influenced by many interdependent factors and are hard to disentangle. ...
Evidence-informed change (EIC) has gained attention recently because it is seen as a lever to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of educational change. Important questions are: how is EIC conceptualized, what counts as evidence, and what factors can support EIC in practice? Because of the complexity of EIC, we aimed to understand these factors from a systems perspective. Different parts of the educational system (e.g. policy, practice of teachers’ and school leaders, research) are interrelated and need to be aligned for effective and sustainable change. Based on our scoping review we propose a model that conceptualizes EIC, identifies and defines different sources of evidence, and discusses influencing factors describing a system's readiness and capacity for EIC. Our results are an important step forward in understanding and supporting EIC in practice and developing targeted policy. This article also defines a common ground for future research, bringing together insights in an integrated framework of evidence-informed change.
Teacher evaluation systems work to balance summative and formative goals. Instructional observations are an important part of such systems, allowing evaluation to directly impact instruction. Research shows that summative and formative goals can conflict with each other. This paper examines whether the summative usage of observation scores contributes to summative evaluation. We find that, after accounting for traditional principal ratings, observation scores provide little predictive validity for identifying high quality teachers. Given the reviewed negative impacts of summative uses of observation scores in teacher evaluation, teacher evaluation systems should reconsider the summative usage of observation scores.
Purpose
Research shows data-informed leadership matters for school improvement and student achievement, but less is known about what motivates leaders’ data use toward such outcomes, particularly in the Catholic school context.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative interview study uses interview (n = 23) data from a sample of Catholic school leaders to unpack how they conceptualize data, the motivations encouraging their data use and the challenges inhibiting data routines.
Findings
Catholic school leaders largely shared a narrow definition of data as quantitative, standardized achievement data, were motivated by a moral imperative to meet students’ needs and faced several common challenges, including time constraints, uncertainty in measurement, limited capacity and resources and issues of turnover at the classroom and school levels.
Practical implications
School leaders can assuage tension around data by broadening the scope of measures and appealing to teachers’ sense of personal responsibility and commitment to students.
Originality/value
These findings extend the research in three ways. They bring to light an important tension between data-informed practice and a whole child approach to education, highlight the possibility of motivating data use through conscience rather than compliance and provide insight into data perceptions in private schools, an understudied context in the literature.
Purpose: There is little consensus in the literature regarding a) what it means for a school leader to lead with data, and b) how to measure data-informed leadership in a reliable and valid way. This study examines the psychometric properties of an operational measure intended to assess the extent to which a school leader is a ‘data-informed school leader. The measurement invariance, reliabilities and construct and predictive validities of the Data-Informed School Leadership Survey (DISL Survey) are assessed using various psychometric statistical techniques. Methods: Using data collected from teachers in 155 public middle schools in a southern state, the following psychometric statistics used to address our purpose: the Many-Facet Rasch (MFR) Model, Bayesian second-order Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling- Multiple Indicators, Multiple Causes analysis (Bayesian SEM-MIMIC), and reliability analysis. Findings: Results: confirm an adequate fit from all MFR, Bayesian CFA, and MIMIC models and a high reliability (Cronbach α = .98). The DISL Survey instrument exhibits sound psychometric properties. Results likewise confirm the value of using MFR modeling and Bayesian methods to examine the psychometric properties of DISL Survey as a means of improving educational leadership measures. Implications for Research and Practice: Data from this study confirm the validity and reliability of the Data-Informed School Leadership Survey (DISL Survey) as an instrument to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Data-Informed School Leadership (DISL) and as such a means for providing feedback for improving such leadership. Heretofore a measure for assessing this leadership was non-existent.
Purpose
With the arrival of the big data era, governments have appointed a chief data officer (CDO) to meet the opportunities and challenges brought by big data. The existing research on the CDOs is very limited, and what does exist focuses primarily on what are CDOs do. Little research has explored how CDOs do. To fill this gap, this study employed ambidexterity theory to investigate the ambidexterity of CDOs’ impact on data-driven innovation.
Design/methodology/approach
To empirically test the model, a survey study was conducted to empirically test the model. Data were collected from 261 CDOs in government and government employees in big data management centers or bureaus. The collected data were analyzed quantitatively to answer hypotheses using a structural equation model.
Findings
The findings suggest that data exploitation and data exploration significantly influence data-driven leadership, culture and value propositions. Data-driven leadership and value propositions significantly impact government performance.
Originality/value
This study is one of the first attempts to investigate how CDOs work, especially when promoting data-driven innovation. In addition, this study extends ambidexterity theory into the issue of the CDO in government.
Educational leaders are increasingly expected to use school climate data to improve outcomes and promote equity for all learners, including in California where school climate is included in state accountability policy. In this study, beliefs towards school climate assessment were explored in a sample (n=298) of California superintendents using a 37-item Likert-style instrument. Data were analyzed using an item response approach and latent class analysis. Findings showed variation in beliefs including three subgroups labeled “true believers” “still questioning” and “remains skeptical.” Findings suggest these groupings influence policy adoption and implementation. Education leaders are in a unique position to interpret and use school climate assessment data to facilitate change if they believe it is important, have the capacity, and trust the data. Implications for school and district improvement under the California continuous improvement model relies on stakeholders and local educational leaders believing in the value of school climate data and trusting its uses to effect change.
Background/Context
Though change is constant in organizations, determining how to successfully implement planned change has been a perennial challenge for both organizational scholars and practitioners. While the empirical knowledge base on planned change in schools and other organizations offers numerous insights, the inattention to activity, or the practice of leading and managing change, remains. Organizational change theory, and specifically organizational routines, offers a useful lens with which to examine planned change in work practice in schools.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to understand the role organizational routines play in changing school work practice.
Research Design
We employed a longitudinal case study of leadership practice at Adams, a K–8 urban school, over the course of four years. We spent 90 days collecting observations, interviews, and artifacts from a wide range of individuals (e.g., teachers and administrators). We identified one key routine, the Five Week Assessment Routine, and analyzed the ostensive and performative aspects of the routine, identifying similarities and differences in the routine over time. In addition, we identified two different kinds of change, planned and unplanned, as well as the reasons why participants changed the routine.
Conclusions
Organizational routines structure work practice, stabilizing it over time, even in the face of considerable change. They represent one mechanism for sustaining leadership. In addition, routines can be a source of both episodic and continuous change in the work place. New routines can serve as a mechanism to build instructional coherence, internal accountability, and professional community. This account suggests that one way to change norms and culture in an organization is through the design and implementation of new routines. Leaders can create opportunities for change in school practice. By designing and supporting an organizational routine, the leaders at Adams focused the practice of the faculty on improving teaching and learning in ways they had never done before. The case of Adams demonstrates that in the enactment of a routine, school staff can also create change in practice. How they make sense of the routine, and integrate it into their practice, can create shifts in teaching and learning. Change happens in the interplay between individual agency and the structure of the routine. Through a case study of one organizational routine in one school, we analyzed how organizational routines can enable both change and constancy in school practice.
This book brings together contributions from researchers within various social science disciplines who seek to redefine the methods and topics that constitute the study of work. They investigate work activity in ways that do not reduce it to a 'psychology' of individual cognition nor to a 'sociology' of societal structures and communication. A key theme in the material is the relationship between theory and practice. This is not an abstract problem of interest merely to social scientists. Rather, it is discussed as an issue that working people address when they attempt to understand a task and communicate its demands. Mindful practices and communicative interaction are examined as situated issues at work in the reproduction of communities of practice in a variety of settings including: courts of law, computer software design, the piloting of airliners, the coordination of air traffic control, and traffic management in underground railway systems.
The teaching and learning of mathematics in K-12 classrooms is changing. New curricula and methods engage learners in working on real problems. An essential feature of this work involves teacher and students in 'talking mathematics'. How can students learn to do this kind of talking? What can they learn from doing it? First published in 1998, this book addresses these questions by looking at the processes of formulating problems, interpreting contexts in which problems arise, and arguing about the reasonableness of proposed solutions. The studies in this volume seek to retain the complexity of classroom practice rather than looking at it through a particular academic lens.
Humanity and the very notion of the human subject are under threat from postmodernist thinking which has declared not only the 'Death of God' but also the 'Death of Man'. This book is a revindication of the concept of humanity, rejecting contemporary social theory that seeks to diminish human properties and powers. Archer argues that being human depends on an interaction with the real world in which practice takes primacy over language in the emergence of human self-consciousness, thought, emotionality and personal identity - all of which are prior to, and more basic than, our acquisition of a social identity. This original and provocative new book from leading social theorist Margaret S. Archer builds on the themes explored in her previous books Culture and Agency (CUP 1988) and Realist Social Theory (CUP 1995). It will be required reading for academics and students of social theory, cultural theory, political theory, philosophy and theology.
Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild."
Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system.
Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations.
Bradford Books imprint
The situative perspective shifts the focus of analysis from individual behavior and cognition to larger systems that include behaving cognitive agents interacting with each other and with other subsystems in the environment. The first section presents a version of the situative perspective that draws on studies of social interaction, philosophical situation theory, and ecological psychology. Framing assumptions and concepts are proposed for a synthesis of the situative and cognitive theoretical perspectives, and a further situative synthesis is suggested that would draw on dynamic-systems theory. The second section discusses relations between the situative, cognitive, and behaviorist theoretical perspectives and principles of educational practice. The third section discusses an approach to research and social practice called interactive research and design, which fits with the situative perspective and provides a productive, albeit syncretic, combination of theory-oriented and instrumental functions of research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
What is the shoulder-to-the grindstone work of transforming underperforming schools into higher performing schools? What makes this work so difficult? This book sheds light on these questions from the perspective of the Success for All Foundation (SFAF), an organization that has collaborated with thousands of elementary schools to enact a common strategy for comprehensive school reform, all in an effort to improve the reading achievement of millions of students. This story of SFAF spans twenty turbulent years. It begins in 1987, with the strategy of improving reading achievement by improving students' cooperative learning in classrooms. It stretches through 2008, with efforts to influence federal education policy to support that strategy. There is nothing in the story to suggest a quick fix. Rather, the theme that emerges is that the problems and possibilities of effective, large-scale, sustainable education reform lie in the complexity of public education: in interdependencies among underperforming schools, programs of reform, the organizations that advance those programs, and the environments in which all operate. The story ultimately locates the problems of education reform not in schools but, instead, in reformers, themselves. By tracing SFAF's deep push into public education, the purpose of the book is to assist a wide array of reformers in seeing, understanding, and ultimately confronting its complexity.