NCREL's Learning Point (Summer 2000)
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Teachers and Students as Action Researchers: Using Data Daily
By Cinder Cooper with Allison Cromey
Imagine this: Eight-year old Sally bounces to the front of the room with a chart transparency in hand. She flicks on the projector, goes to the screen, and using a yard stick points to the lines representing the week of October 8, 2000. "I met all the learning goals that Ms. Smith and I set for me. As you can see by this learning picture, I accelerated and increased the number of problems I did right by 15 this week. On Wednesday the 11th, I decelerated [dipped]. See my note about missing class the day before. I talked to Ms. Smith and told her that I went home early and forgot to take home my worksheets. She worked with me during music. Then I took some flash cards home and I practiced with my older brother. The next day I worked with Chris (who's working on the same stuff that I am) to do a new timing. By Friday, I was back on track and met my target. Now I'm ready to move on to the next number family."
In the Creve Coeur School District in central Illinois, teachers are piloting a data-driven process called precision teaching, which calls for students to be active participants in their learning. They make goals and strive to reach them, and if they aren't learning, they know that their teacher and even other students will intervene and give them extra resources. On a daily basis, students practice and record their performances on academic tasks, and teachers work with them to adjust the curriculum or classroom instruction based on how well they are improving and learning. To complement this practice, Creve Coeur teachers used a basic-skills curriculum specifically designed to progress in steps based upon individual student performance.
This is a sample of a chart used by Creve Coeur students to track their daily progress in math.
Jami Vance, third-grade teacher at Homewood Heights School, states, "As a teacher I'm getting more immediate feedback. It would take me a grading period to know if someone went up or down. [Now] kids can say 'I accelerated today' or 'I had a bad day today; I've got to get my score up.' On a daily basis the kids are making judgments about their learning."
But how did Creve Coeur come to use data in this way? According to Superintendent Dean Peyton, data from standardized test scores indicated that students were not achieving in some curricular areas, particularly in math. Teachers and administrators in the Creve Coeur district knew that something had to be done or their kids would always be struggling to keep up. Peyton admits, "I wasn't looking for data-driven decision making [D3M]. I was looking for ways to improve our school and improve the learning of our kids. Along those lines, D3M just made sense in the overall perspective." Creve Coeur began a partnership with NCREL and the Illinois Institute of Technology to rethink how they were teaching math and how they could use data to effect positive change.
From informal conversations and from examining curricula, teachers realized that they were spending too much time reviewing and teaching basic math facts when students should have already been fluent by at least the middle of third grade. Vance asserts, "Part of the problem was that we never got to the higher-level skills because we spent so much time on and reviewing basic facts." Each year the math scores reflected the pattern.
The Creve Coeur team's first move was to compact the math curriculum in pilot classes--at least the basic skills component. Pilot teachers began timing students individually (seeing how many problems they could correctly complete in a given time frame) and helping them set goals. The teachers used charts to plot where each child was and where he or she needed to be. Both teacher and student were able to see progress or stagnation by looking at data plotted on a chart. Eventually the students could do their own charts and see if they were accelerating, decelerating, or flatlining (not improving but not declining). "If we saw students flatlining or decelerating, then we'd have an intervention," points out Vance. "We'd talk about it, do another timing, and identify the facts that they hadn't mastered yet. Then we'd make flash cards and then send them home with the parents and say 'We're struggling with these, could you help at home?' "
Another promising aspect of Creve Coeur's work with data is "chart sharing." After working for a week or two, students put their compiled data on a chart transparency and present it to the class. According to Vance, "Students get a chance to show off their learning and get constructive feedback from their peers. I noticed that when we didn't do chart shares, some kids' scores really dropped off. They knew they weren't going to have to be responsible for it or have to share it with the class. As soon as I would announce that we're going to have a chart share, scores came up because it made them more accountable for their learning and work." Students weren't the only ones mulling over chart data. Teachers also had opportunities to share charts. Like the students, they met once a week to share information, get feedback, and offer advice.
In the fall of 2000, the six teachers who participated in the pilot will share their expertise with other first- through fourth-grade teachers. "The trick," says Peyton, "will be to take these precision teaching techniques--the charting, the sharing, the peer coaching, the timing, everything--and apply it and adapt it to other subjects. First we want to get a comfort level for our teachers including special ed classrooms... in terms of the basic math. We will be looking at other schools that have implemented these things successfully. Right now it's baby steps."
Peyton offers this advice: Gather much data quite frequently or it's not worth it. Then make sure that the data you are analyzing is the data that you need to be analyzing so that when you try to make decisions you know that you are basing them on the correct data.
Resources
Educational Leadership Journal, February 2000, "Creating Data-Driven Schools" by Penny Noyce, David Perda, and Rob Traver.
Data-Driven School Improvement by James H. Johnson, (1997), ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management, Eugene, OR, (ED401595). [Online]. Available http://www.eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED401595
Educational Leadership. "What Do We Mean by Results?" Vol 57(5), 2000, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
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