Exploring data use among teachers in the Republic of Ireland

1. IntroductionThe Irish social and economic landscape has been marked by considerable change in recent years. Our economic plight has refocused political attention on education; with educational change being marked out as a potential route to recovery. Irish educators have been tasked with improving their schools and the Literacy and Numeracy for Learning and Life document, (DES, 2011a), along with the School Self-Evaluation Guidelines for Primary Schools (DES, 2013) have been presented as the blueprints for change. Both of these documents specify that whole school data analysis should play a functional role in future school development practices. They propose the data enquiry cycle as a mechanism for change. However, it is unclear how Irish schools will set about this change, it is unclear whether they are ready for this change, and it is unclear if they want to change. It is essential that these three ambiguities are explored from both a theoretical and concrete research base.2. Data-Informed Practice in EducationThe notion of using data in schools is by no means a novel initiative, with data-informed practices in education being commonplace for more than a decade in the U.S.A., Australia and in England. However, it would appear that the effectuality of these approaches has not always been evident. Romero and Ventura's (2010) review of the literature on the art of data-mining, suggests that while there is a consistent trend towards increased use of data-based practices in schools internationally, there are inconsistencies with regard to how the data is used and with regard to the success of these initiatives. Two of the most regularly cited obstacles to making progress with data are teacher attitudes towards data and teachers' data-literacy, including their ability to use data to inform planning.Johnson (2004) contends that while "few of us are statisticians at heart" there is an essential requirement to enable teachers "to make meaning out of raw data" (p.6). Data literacy is described as "the ability to examine multiple measures and multiple levels of data, to consider the research and to draw sound inferences" (Love, 2004, p. 22). A series of decoding skills must be acquired prior to becoming data literate. Earl and Katz, (2006) suggest that educators need to be able to differentiate between sound and unsound data and to have a strong sense of basic statistical concepts and measurements. Researchers also indicate that teachers need to understand the limitations of certain data and what interpretations are considered valid (Firestone & Gonzalez, 2007). However, the evidence suggests that "educators are woefully under-prepared to engage in data-based decision making (Earl & Katz , 2006, p.4). Supovitz and Klein (2003) conducted explorative research in the area of data use in schools in the U.S.A. and found that only 19% of school leaders felt that they had the technical skills to manipulate the data in order to use it to answer the questions that they wanted to ask (p. 38). Given the substantial head-start that American school leaders have had over Irish principals with regards to coming to terms with data, one could reliably presume that the level of data expertise among our school leaders and within our schools is even lower.A general "mistrust" of data has been noted among educators (Earl and Katz, 2006). This mistrust was evidenced in Ingram, Louis, and Schroeder's (2004) findings that teachers tend to disregard data in favour of their own "personal metric" for evaluating their instructional effectiveness. It was highlighted that teachers "base their decisions on experience, intuition and anecdotal information (professional judgment)" instead of systematically collected information (p. 128). Young and Kim (2007) detected the same doubting disposition towards test data, also suggesting that teachers view assessment results as separate from rather than integral to their teaching. …