Using research and data to define and measure success (on your terms!).
Message Body : Chances are, as a school administrator you may feel like maximizing the potential for educational data, research, and evaluation is out of your reach. Many feel educational research and data has been too long monopolized by state and federal policy makers whose efforts have failed to empower teacher and student voice within schools. It is clear that the current generation of punitive, one-size-fits-all approaches for measuring success and tracking student progress with empirical data has been limited in scope and rarely results in providing educators and school leaders with the information and data that they care most about. Over the same time period that data-centric state and regional assessment programs have gained stature and prominence, we have also seen a profound rise in teachers and students access to increasingly powerful educational technology in their classrooms. We know that educational technology provides can provide many opportunities for evolving teaching, learning, and classroom practices. Unbeknownst to most, many of the same advances in computing technology allowing classroom transformation have also profoundly transformed educational research and opportunities for capturing data. Just at educational technology allows a classroom teacher an infinitely wider scope of curricular content, a new generation educational research and data tools allow schools greater opportunities to empirically capture and assess more nuanced and articulated definition of success. At the upcoming LFL2015 conference, http://leadingfuturelearning.org/, I am excited to be sharing my perspective as a research scientist and some of the newest ideas and best practices for how schools can leverage educational research and empirical data tools to empower their leadership, give systematic voice to teachers and students, and allow a more nuanced focus and definition of “success” in their community.
About the Author : Dr. Damian Bebell is an Assistant Research Professor at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and principal researcher for the International Research Collaborative’s 1:1 student computing research. Damian is a frequent keynote speaker and publishes regularly on investigating the implementation and effects of technology in education.