The Spencer Foundation is pleased to announce a new initiative on Data Use and Educational Improvement. This research program will support scholarship that examines the conditions, contexts, and underlying factors and processes that affect how educational organizations use data and information for improvement. There is great potential for data to support and even transform educational policy and practice in various settings. But for many educators the promise of improvement through the use of data is constrained and even thwarted by a wide array of factors. Too often, we are unaware of how these factors affect our ability to use data for improvement.
This initiative questions the assumption that the simple presence of data invariably leads to improved outcomes and performance, and that those who are presented information under data-driven improvement schemes will know how best to make sense of it and transform their practice. Our intent is to attend to the factors and underlying processes that can explain which data, in what contexts, and under what circumstances contribute to particular outcomes. We also focus on the capacities needed by school and district practitioners as well as college and university faculty and staff to translate, interpret, use, and evaluate the effectiveness of the particular data they use to drive improvement.
It is not difficult to hypothesize about what might be happening in various settings; we’ve all heard stories about school principals drowning in data, or college administrators warned by legislators that their institutions will be held accountable on various performance measures intended to improve certain outcomes. But the field knows relatively little about what is actually happening once educators encounter data. We hope to remedy that gap by supporting rigorous, high quality scholarship with a research agenda, and we invite research proposals to advance that agenda.
Application Guidelines for the Initiative on Data Use and Educational Improvement - click here.