Teachers’ Use of School Information Systems for Data-Driven Decision-Making: Who is Serving Whom?

Abstract

We report on a qualitative study (N=15) of K-12 school teachers’ use of a school information system for their daily decision-making, particularly on areas of decision-making, practices of data-feeding into the system, and using the stored data for decision-making. Our findings suggest that teachers make decisions mostly regarding pedagogical practices and about teacher-student relationship; that they mostly feed data to the system following school regulations; and that the system is of little use when it comes to actually making decisions. In general, the research shows that instead of helping teachers, School Information Systems often become a burden on them.