Data driven decision-making in the era of accountability: Fostering faculty data cultures for learning

Data driven decision-making in the era of accountabilityFostering faculty data cultures for learning Matthew T. Hora (bio), Jana Bouwma-Gearhart (bio), and Hyoung Joon Park (bio) One of the defining characteristics of current U.S. educational policy at all levels is a focus on using evidence, or data, to inform decisions about institutional and educator quality, budgetary decisions, and what and how to teach students. This approach is often viewed as a corrective to the way that teachers have made decisions in the past—on the basis of less reliable information sources such as anecdote or intuition—and is seen by advocates as a core feature of successful educational reform (Mandinach, 2012). Underlying End Page 391 the current push for data driven decision-making (hereafter DDDM) is the idea of continuous improvement, which refers to systems that are designed to continually monitor organizational processes in order to identify problems and then enact corrective measures (Bhuiyan Halverson, Grigg, Prichett, Little, 2012). In seeking to understand the impacts of the environment on data practices, this line of inquiry emphasizes the cultural aspects of data use, where educators engage in routinized practices with colleagues while using shared language and tools to conduct their work (Spillane, 2012). Given documented challenges with the effective institution of DDDM in schools, particularly at the classroom level, such insights can be an important tool to improve interventions by ensuring that they are aligned with or responsive to the norms and practices of specific organizations, as opposed to a "top-down" approach that is a far less effective approach to reform (Fullan, 2010; Mandinach, 2012; Spillane, Halverson Picciano, 2012). At the classroom level, some argue that the use of predictive modeling can improve teaching and learning through learning analytics, which is seen as an evidence-based way to tailor instruction to student needs and to generally improve faculty1 decision-making (Baepler Wright, McKay, Hershock, Miller, & Tritz, 2014). Taken together, these developments indicate that higher education has entered an accountability phase not unlike that in the K–12 sector at the beginning of the 1990s. Thus, a pressing question facing higher education is whether the lessons learned...