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Coaches Institute:

How to Use Data

Maryland Department of Education

Wisconsin’s site has 4 sections:  Standards and Assessment, Data Analysis, Continuous School Improvement and Best Practices to guide users to key local, state and national information about success in education. 

The NCREL Toolbelt:  A Collection of Data-Driven Decision Making Tools for Educators includes information-gathering tools ranging from checklists to surveys. Some tools are designed for printing and circulating in paper form, while others are computer-based surveys or Web sites.

National Staff Development Council Library: Data-Driven Decision Making help you understand the importance of using data in guiding your professional development

Using Data to Improve Schools (2002) – American Association of School Administrators explains how to use various data to promote whole-school change and provides tools and insights to help schools cultivate “a district-wide culture of inquiry that values the power of data to inform sound decision-making and improve teaching and learning.” 

West Ed’s resource of Comprehensive Strategies To Achieve High Standards: A Guidebook to School Improvement has specific tools for coaches. 

Books: 

  • Deborah Wahlstrom Using Data to Improve Student Achievement,

  • Victoria Bernhardt, Data Analysis, The School Porfolio, The Example School Portfolio, The School Portfolio Toolkit, Available from: Eye on Education.

  • Mike Schmoker, The Results Fieldbook:  Practical Strategies from Dramatically Improved Schools

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Assessment

Thinking about Tests and Testing:  A Short Primer in “Assessment Literacy.”  This easy-to-use resource guide written by Gerald Bracey is designed for persons not entirely confident about the terms and acronyms that go along with student assessment discussions.  The glossary of assessment terms is especially helpful.

Maine has developed an extraordinary site on developing local assessments, ie local tests which complement state exams. These Local assessments may include portfolios, performances and demonstrations in addition to other measures of achievement.  Coaches will find it valuable in helping schools construct local assessments. 

 Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators - A collection of assessment rubrics and graphic organizers that may be helpful to you as you design your own. 

Textbooks for designing good assessments recommended by MSU professor, Mark Reckase

  • Oosterhof, Albert (2001).  Classroom applications of educational measurement (3rd ed.).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Merrill Prentice Hall.

  • Nitko, Anthony J.  (2001).  Educational assessment of students (3rd ed.)

  •  Linn, R. L. & Gronlund, N. E.  (2000)  Measurement and assessment in teaching (8th ed.)

The National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST):  CRESST provides research studies on student assessment. This site also offers samples of assessments and reports on assessing low-achieving students and students with disabilities. This site links you to CRESST newsletters, guides, sample assessments and an alternative assessment database.

 

Robert Marzano

·         Assessing Student Outcomes: Performance Assessment Using the Dimensions of Learning Model

·         Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement

·         A Comprehensive Guide to Designing Standards-Based Districts, Schools, and Classrooms,  

·         Transforming Classroom Grading

Brualdi, Amy “Implementing Performance Assessment in the Classroom”  

 

Good resources on many topics

The Education Commission for the States has a good number of references of education issues.  In addition, their list of website connections by topic is succinct and thorough, without overwhelming, 

Search all the Regional Education Labs and the resources of the US Department of Education all at one time for any topic, 

Chief Council of State Officers, all publications can be printed in Adobe.  

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Learning to Use Excel, Databases, and Data Warehousing

Thinking about a Data warehouse:  a series of articles to help you think about purchasing and using a data warehouse 

Victoria Bernhardt, Designing and Using Databases for School Improvement

Tutorials for how to learn Excel

http://math.about.com/cs/excel/ 

http://www.microsoft.com/education/tutorial/default.asp

An excellent introduction to data warehousing:  Smart Data:  Mining the School District Data Warehouse, by Lars Konglem in Electronic School.com.  This article includes specific products.

Victoria Bernhardt’s vision of what you can do with a data warehouse –published in Education Leadership this winter. (I like this)

 

School Climate materials

Safety in Numbers:  Collecting and Using Crime, Violence, and Discipline Incident Data to Make a Difference in Schools is designed to be used by school staff to improve the effectiveness of their efforts to collect and use disciplinary incident data.  Collect this data on a palm pilot and you have an excellent start to look at what’s occurring in your school.  http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/safety/ 

When schools create a positive school climate by reaching out to families and providing structures for them to become involved, the result is effective school-family partnerships. http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/famncomm/pa300.htm 

The NAEP tests and what they say about urban high poverty schools, http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/    

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Process Data

Survey of Enacted Curriculum:  The Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) are research-based tools that collect, report, and use data on what content is taught and how it is taught. The tools allow you to compare what is taught to standards and assessments. The data are represented in scales and maps that can then be used to analyze instruction relative to curriculum, standards, and assessments. The surveys can be taken online and compiled.

Books by Deborah Wahlstrom and Victoria Bernhardt 

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ESL and Working with Immigrants

National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs. Provides sources on best practices for meeting the needs of English language learners including an on-line library and a rich database. It also has resources for children from many diverse cultures, including stories.

CREDE is a federally funded research and development program focused on improving the education of students whose ability to reach their potential is challenged by language or cultural barriers, race, geographic location, or poverty.

Professional development in culturally diverse schools. This digest focuses on professional development for teachers in culturally diverse schools.

“Promoting Language Proficiency and Academic Achievement Through Cooperation” Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk, Johns Hopkins University. Cooperative learning is an instructional strategy that provides the social structure for learners to work cooperatively in groups. Although it was developed for use with native English speakers, cooperative learning has been found to be effective for promoting the academic achievement, language acquisition, and social development of English language learners

ESLgold.com is for teachers looking for easy-to-access handouts, lesson plans and exercises that you can print out and take directly to class. It’s also an online resource center for students.

Reforming Mathematics Instruction for ESL Literacy Students

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Special Education

National Dissemination Center for Children and Youth with Disabilities serves as a central source of information on: IDEA, the nation's special education law, NCLB (as it relates to children with disabilities), and Research-based information on effective educational practices.

Eric Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education

Special Education Technical Assistance and Dissemination Network: many good state and federal resources for school leaders.

Kathy Schrock’s Guide for Educators: Special Education

The Special Needs Opportunity Windows or SNOW Project is a provider of online resources and professional development opportunities for educators and parents of students with special needs.

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Tolerance

Teaching Tolerance serves as a clearinghouse of information about anti-bias programs and activities being implemented in schools across the country. From the Southern Poverty Law Project.

Dealing with bullying in schools

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Turning around Low-Performing schools

School reform efforts in Chicago have been tracked for many years. 

See http://www.consortium-chicago.org/index.html .  Most publications can be viewed on line. Click on the icon  on the right side of the screen.  The complete list of reports is at http://www.consortium-chicago.org/publications/pi001.html  The best reports on school reform evaluate the Annenberg challenge. 

Hope for Urban Education:  A Study of Nine High-Performing, High-Poverty Urban Elementary Schools  http://www.ed.gov/pubs/urbanhope/index.html 

The Promising Practices Network at the Rand Corporation:  www.promisingpractices.net highlights programs and practices that credible research indicates are effective in improving outcomes for children and families.  Topics relevant for schools are: 

Northern Lights: Success in Student Achievement and School Discipline at Northern Elementary School  http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/kentucky/kentucky2.html 

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 Instructional Practice

Teaching Practices Surveys from NCES:  NCES has several longitudinal surveys of instructional  practices that can be downloaded from the web.  

McRel has a number of studies of effective teaching and leadership practices including

Helping At-Risk Students Meet Standards:  A Synthesis of Evidence-Based Classroom Practices, McRel Regional Educational Laboratory.  What are effective strategies that can be used to assist low-achieving students? 

School, Teacher, and Leadership Impacts on Student Achievement  By integrating these strategies into their current classroom practice, teachers can help students deepen their understanding and strengthen their proficiency. 

McREL. (2000). School practices survey: User guide for practitioners. Aurora, CO: Author.  Spiral Bound Book with diskette $20.00 (Includes shipping and handling.  McREL has developed the School Practices Survey (SPS). The survey is based on a set of learner-centered psychological principles developed by the American Psychological Association and McREL. The survey is designed to quiz teachers, administrators, and others in the school community on their perceptions of their school's or district's policies and practices as they relate to these principles. The guidebook provides a survey overview, describes the principles, explains the survey's purposes, and gives examples of ways to use resulting data to design appropriate staff development activities. Step-by-step instructions for analyzing and reporting data, both manually and by using software, accompany the survey. The guidebook includes the survey, blank forms for manual data analysis, and a data analysis diskette containing worksheets for use with Microsoft Excel.

What Works in Classroom Instruction, Marzano, R. J., Gaddy, B. B., & Dean, C. (2000). Aurora, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning. http://www.mcrel.org/topics/productDetail.asp?productID=110  available on the web or from ASCD.   This study identifies nine instructional categories that strongly affect student achievement:  Identifying similarities and differences, Summarizing and note taking, Activating prior knowledge, Reinforcing effort and providing recognition, Homework and practice, Nonlinguistic representations, Cooperative learning, Setting goals and providing feedback, and Generating and testing hypotheses.

 What's Noteworthy on Learners, Learning & Schooling  has a number of profiles of good teaching practices which could be put into a good survey. 

Classroom Interactions and Achievement, by Loyce Caruthers 

Johns Hopkins University Center for the Education of Students Placed at Risk.  The long list of technical reports include instructional strategies that work for inner city children and how to implement these strategies.  http://www.csos.jhu.edu/crespar/reports.htm   

An article to read to evaluate teacher classroom practices is How Schools Matter:
The Link Between Teacher Classroom Practices and Student Academic Performance, Harold Wenglinsky,  Educational Testing Service. (2002, February 13). Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(12). Retrieved [date] from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n12/   or http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n12/#_edn3 

Another article on why we need to collect instructional practice data is at Invited Commentary: Moving Toward Better Instructional Practice Data By: Daniel P. Mayer, Researcher, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., Washington, DC http://nces.ed.gov/programs/quarterly/vol_1/1_2/2-esq12-c.asp 

The teacher surveys at http://www.consortium-chicago.org/surveys/s0002.html are probably more detailed than you want, but the questions on math and literacy practices at the end of the questionnaire are informative and could be used on their own.

 

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