Educators use an increasingly wide range of data to inform decision-making, performance management, and accountability at various levels of the education system. Studies emphasize the impact of data-use cultures in schools, a data-rich environment, although little is known about how educators use data. Therefore, this exploratory study examined…

This study is concerned with how teachers use data about students' ideas in science, elicited from embedded formative assessment probes, to make decisions about next steps in instruction. Since Black and Wiliam's (1998) seminal work on formative assessment, researchers and practitioners alike concerned themselves with formative assessment and its…