Ah yes, let’s talk data. Your data. The data. The data is where everything about your data analysis system sinks or swims. So it pays to have some idea of what kind of data to collect.

After3 acknowledges that our focus is continuous school improvement, rather than Accountability. Notice we didn’t use the formalized process, that is, “Continuous School Improvement,” while we did capitalize Accountability. By continuous school improvement, we simply mean some “well defined, repeatable process — actuated by human agency — by which an organization incorporates data-use into its daily culture and decision-making for the purposes of policy evaluation and instructional change.” In contrast, we understand Accountability as federal or state mandates which require districts and schools to achieve outcomes typically determined by some legislative or executive body.

We won’t bother to address the differences beyond these statements, for the time being. That’s not really the purpose of this post.

So. Given that we’re considering data within the framework of continuous school improvement (for the sake of brevity hereafter, CSI), what kind of data might you consider collecting?

Student data and test data are two obvious domains. Is there anything beyond this? If you’re implementing CSI, there is. The acknowledged thought-leader in the arena is a lady who has published books about K12 data and CSI since 1997: Dr. Victoria L. Bernhardt.

Take a gander at this illustration. In an invited monograph for the California Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, “Multiple Measures,” Dr. Bernhardt suggests that you gather data within four “data domains.” Those domains include

• Demographics (enrollment, attendance, ethnicity, gender and the like),
• Student Learning (standardized tests, criterion-referenced tests, benchmarks, teacher observations and so on),
• School processes (school programs and ‘ways of doing business’), and finally
• Perceptions (survey results about how students, staff and parents feel about the learning environment, its mission, and the community values).

Study the illustration (you can find the entire article here). It’s not the only way to categorize the data you’ll need, but it is effective. And Dr. Bernhardt has certainly given a great deal of thought to what questions can be answered within each domain. That’s probably enough to consider for now.