Using evidence in inquiry

Many schools collect a great deal of information about their students, but often they do not use the information to drive improvement (Hattie, 2005).

Useful data helps teachers and school leaders to understand:

• what students need in order to achieve outcomes the school community has identified as important
• where students stand in relation to national patterns of progress
• in what areas students need support to catch up with others in their year group.

Collecting data in connection with less tangible outcomes (such as sociocultural and affective) is more difficult and requires close observation and learning conversations with students, parents, and whānau. 

Schools also collect data about teacher knowledge and practice, and they should be collecting data about their relationships with whānau.

The key to using this data effectively within appraisal is to connect it both to data on student goals and outcomes and to data about school-wide needs and priorities.

In deciding on the data to collect, schools need to take into account the aspirations of whānau and the knowledge and skills that they regard as important, including cultural knowledge and practices and language.

• What are those aspirations? 
• What is the data you need to collect to find out whether they are being achieved? (NOTE: This may not be the same across different Māori communities and whānau.)

Ki te Aotūroa: Improving Inservice Teacher Educator Learning and Practice (STEP) (2008) – research project onthe practice and learning of inservice teacher educators

The Inservice Teacher Education Practice (INSTEP) project (Ministry of Education, 2008) identified three steps in the data collection process.

1. Deciding what information is needed
2. Choosing appropriate tools
3. Using the tools

To begin, schools need to separate the data for Māori students and for specific cohorts of Māori students (for example, boys versus girls).

Then, organise that data so that all those with responsibility for student learning, including whānau, can access it and make sense of its implications.

Data becomes evidence when people analyse what it reveals about current beliefs and practices about teaching and learning.

This analysis requires more than understanding statistics – it means asking where students are, why they are there, and what teachers, leaders, and whānau can do, individually and collectively, to help them do better.

Inservice Teacher Education Practice (INSTEP) further describes the analytical process as one of “making sense” of the data that has been gathered. This needs to be done within an analytical framework.

INSTEP describes three steps in the critical analysis of data:

1. Drawing initial inferences on the basis of our expectations
2. Asking deeper, more complex questions in order to make sense of the data
3. Making decisions about where to go next.

Evaluation of the service Teacher Education Practice Project (INSTEP) (2009) – explains how INSTEP's contributions to bringing about shifts in knowledge, skills, and expertise.

The Education Review Office (2011) describes data analysis in terms of three “levels”:

The process of selecting and analysing data can make people feel vulnerable. A key theme from the Ruia exploratory study was that teachers and school leaders should feel supported as they build their confidence in working with data and understanding what it is telling them about the next steps for them and their students.

Keep the data alive as part of the ongoing inquiry.

This means organising and storing it so that it is easily accessible and enables students’ progress to be tracked.

Student management systems have evolved and allow trends and patterns to be studied over time. For example, users can identify attendance patterns and which students are not attending. Teachers, leaders, and whānau can then collaborate to address the issue.

A good way of making the monitoring of progress manageable is to select a small group of Māori students in each class as ‘focus students’ for more intensive tracking.

This does not mean that other students are ignored; in fact, experience shows that this raises teachers’ awareness of how their practice impacts on all their students.

Schools committed to educationally powerful partnerships ensure that parents and whānau can use this tracked information so that they, too, understand their children’s progress and can participate in identifying their next learning steps. (Note, though, that it remains important to respect students’ right to privacy.)

Ki te Aotūroa: Improving Inservice Teacher Educator Learning and Practice (STEP) is intended primarily for inservice teacher educators (ISTEs).

However, it includes a wealth of useful material for all educators, particularly school leaders.

A chapter on the practical aspects of inquiry examines each phase of the inquiry and knowledge-building cycle. The cycle is adapted for ISTEs, and the big ideas that underpin it are true for all inquiry-based learning.

Of particular value are the links to cases from actual practice that illustrate ISTEs supporting teachers and school leaders to inquire into and improve their practice.