Your how-to accessible guide on how to use data to support your students and your school.

A comprehensive, practical guide to using data effectively for school improvement! This hands-on guidebook explains essential statistical and assessment information to help principals make critical and sustainable choices to promote student learning. Broad-based strategies include collecting and analyzing various types of data about student achievement, professional development, allocation of resources, family involvement, and community standards. Part of theLeadership for Learning series, this resource: Supports school leaders in developing and sustaining continuous improvement Links data-based decision making with issues of accountability and shared mission and goals Includes numerous examples and cases, a glossary, school improvement template, sample forms, and data tools

This indispensable practitioner's guide helps to build the capacity of school psychologists, administrators, and teachers to use data in collaborative decision making. It presents an applied, step-by-step approach for creating and running effective data teams within a problem-solving framework. The authors describe innovative ways to improve academic and behavioral outcomes at the individual, class, grade, school, and district levels. Applications of readily available technology tools are highlighted. In a large-size format for easy photocopying, the book includes learning activities and helpful reproducible forms. The companion website provides downloadable copies of the reproducible forms as well as Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, and an online-only chapter on characteristics of effective teams. This book is in The Guilford Practical Intervention in the Schools Series, edited by Sandra M. Chafouleas.

Data in education is increasingly important but, despite their best efforts, teachers and educators frequently struggle to understand the core principles of data use and interpretation. This book will help you understand the use of statistics in education, and show you how to use data effectively in your classroom and school. As a guide to data, the book explores variables and how they are manipulated. It explains both descriptive statistics, which aim to explain the past, and inferential statistics which try to make predictions about the future and the wider population. It also explores how data has been used in the world of educational research, and examines criticisms of using data to summarize children’s education.

Turn skepticism about data into knowledge for true educational reform! More versatile than mere number crunching and statistics, data can be an effective tool—or even a powerful catalyst—for change within a school. Lorna M. Earl and Steven Katz show educators how to become comfortable with data, and provide valuable tools that school leaders and school improvement teams can use in their work, including: Vignettes to support group discussion Activities to give readers a chance to practice ideas and concepts Task sheets Short case studies that show how the full process works

Data Analysis for Continuous School Improvement is about inspiring schools and school districts to commit to continuous school improvement by providing a framework that will result in improving teaching for every teacher, and learning for every student, through the comprehensive use of data. This book provides new and very specific tools, timelines, and strategies that will help schools and districts become true learning organizations.

Our fifth book in the International Research on School Leadership series focuses on the use of data in schools and districts as useful information for leadership and decision making. Schools are awash in data and information, from test scores, to grades, to discipline reports, and attendance as just a short list of student information sources, while additional streams of data feed into schools and districts from teachers and parents as well as local, regional and national policy levels. To deal with the data, schools have implemented a variety of data practices, from data rooms, to data days, data walks, and data protocols. However, despite the flood of data, successful school leaders are leveraging an analysis of their school’s data as a means to bring about continuous improvement in an effort to improve instruction for all students. Nevertheless, some drown, some swim, while others find success. Our goal in this book volume is to bring together a set of chapters by authors who examine successful data use as it relates to leadership and school improvement. In particular, the chapters in this volume consider important issues in this domain, including: • How educational leaders use data to inform their practice. • What types of data and data analysis are most useful to successful school leaders. • To what extent are data driven and data informed practices helping school leaders positively change instructional practice? • In what ways does good data collection and analysis feed into successful continuous improvement and holistic systems thinking? • How have school leadership practices changed as more data and data analysis techniques have become available? • What are the major obstacles facing school leaders when using data for decision making and how do they overcome them?