Datafication in Education: A Closer Look from the Front Lines
This month, we had a chance to survey educators working in a range of school types about their attitudes towards datafication, the increased use of data in education. We asked them questions about the datafication of education and its impact on the profession at large. In this article and the two that follow, I’ll share what we discovered and how that informs the work we do here at Simplicity.
What is datafication?
We’ve written elsewhere about how, nowadays, it seems like data is everywhere in the world of education. From physical data walls to virtual dashboards, most aspects of teaching, learning and schooling can be captured in one form of data or another. Most importantly, we expect decision making to be driven by this information, whether at the level of a single classroom or of nation-wide policy making.
Sample Dashboard
Where do educators think datafication is going?
All of our respondents thought that datafication was here to stay, using words such as useful, empowering, confusing, insightful and trendy to describe it. The staying power of datafication was attributed to a number of sources. The first – and perhaps most obvious – was major technological advances: it’s easier to quantify student (and teacher) data than it ever has been in human history. Given the ongoing acceleration of innovation, this is unlikely to change.
Other, more political factors are at play as well. Schools need to have data in order to get funding. This means that, with the exception of well-heeled private institutions, most schools nowadays simply can’t afford not to have data. What’s more, our definitions of school-level success (percentage of students in school on time, performance on state tests and so on) are framed in terms of data. In this way, datafication is an inescapable part of schooling today.
Do educators think this is a good thing?
Yes!... and no. Some of our respondents were optimistic about the opportunities that data offers us for improving instruction by making gaps and gains in student learning visible.
Others were much more skeptical. They argued that, in many respects, data has led us to see the forest for the trees. After all, data collection and analysis is time consuming. Hours students spend testing, for example, are hours that they aren’t engaged in other meaningful pedagogical activities.
To that end, some of our respondents wondered if datafication has actually eroded the precious amount of time and energy educators end up having for instruction. As others put it, we might just simply be collecting data without closing learning gaps. And if that’s the case, then we run the risk of reducing educators into data collectors and students into data producers.
So then how can we in education do datafication better?
First and foremost, our respondents said that we need to remember that data is secondary to learning. Any innovations in how schools are becoming more data-driven cannot come at the expense of student learning. In other words, the drive to gather more data shouldn’t take the form of more student testing without a clear pedagogical purpose, particularly when there are so many other kinds of data available.
The second point that we heard is about the importance of comprehensive data systems and ensuring that educators have the data literacy skills necessary to use them. Many schools and school systems have made the very important leap of investing in tech solutions, but without the know-how of all adults in the building, these tools will go underutilized.
We’ll discuss more what data-driven educators look like in the coming articles!
Enjoyed our article and want to connect with like-minded education data professionals? Join our K12 Data Professional Facebook Group!
