From a new institutional theoretical perspective, this article explores school actors' sense-making linked to data-based decision making (DBDM) policy in general and processes of data analysis in particular. The study revealed how actors' interpretation of and response to DBDM pointed to strong and weak couplings between and within the local…

Purpose: School principals are increasingly responsible for acting as instructional leaders, but research on data teams typically considers principals as secondary players responsible for ensuring that meetings occur but not necessarily for their quality. We investigated how elementary school principals in one district committed to data use…

Early Warning Systems (EWS) are research-based analytics that use statistical models to assess dropout risk. School leaders use this analytic to consolidate data about a student and provide actionable data to craft an intervention. Little is currently known about the processes involved in school implementation or data use. By analyzing Montana EWS…

Instructional leadership is a complex dimension, which requires that principals possess expertise in goal setting, leading the instructional program, and creating the conditions for a successful school environment. Effective instructional leaders manage the instructional program by planning, coordinating, and evaluating the work of teachers and…

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…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) sponsors the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education in order to collect data on public and private schools, principals, and teachers in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau conducts the survey for NCES. The NTPS provides data on the…

Data- driven decision making DDDM in school settings is often guided and influenced by various sources of data that assist in improving students' outcomes. School principals as the main educational leaders, play a pivotal role in DDDM using the available school data. Semi-structured interviews with 24 school principals were conducted to…

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) sponsors the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education in order to collect data on public and private elementary and secondary schools in the United States. The NTPS is a large-scale, nationally representative sample survey of K-12 public and…

Purpose: Organizational learning (OL) has been conceptualized as a critical component in school change processes. Nevertheless, OL in the school context is still somewhat obscure and difficult to comprehend, thus it is rarely translated into operational structures and processes and later permanently sustained. The purpose of this study is to…

"Using Data for Continuous Improvement in Educator Preparation" provides case studies that illuminate and contextualize the ways in which educator preparation programs determine the data they need to improve, collect data, analyze data, share data with stakeholders, and close the loop by making focused improvements based on the data.…

In this review, I examined the last two decades of research on data use in education to outline the ways in which principals used data to inform their own leadership practices. I found three themes: first, student achievement data were the most widespread form of data that principals used; second, principals' work has been reshaped by teacher…

National interest in using school climate as an accountability measure makes it important to understand how school leaders view and make use of school climate data. The purpose of this study was to investigate how school and district administrators use climate data in Virginia, where a statewide school climate survey is annually administered.…

The aim of the analysis is to present the role of school principals in supporting teachers' skillful use of information and communication technologies in education. The article presents the results of analysis of a fragment of data from a study carried out in 2017 as part of the research project devoted to the specificity of functioning of schools…

Principals at Hunter School District, a pseudonym, lacked capacity for using data, a reflection of the district's lack of a culture of data-driven decision-making. HSD was located in New York City, with 23 schools serving 11,600 students; students were 90% Black or Latino with 90% coming from low-income families and 20% living in temporary…

This research examines what educational administrators can do to help secondary teachers effectively use data to inform their instruction and improve their practice. This qualitative study focused on the interviews of principals and teachers in 14 secondary schools that have used data to improve their school's accountability measures markedly in…