Data will play a key role in the short- and long-term strategies K-12 leaders deploy as they steer their students, schools and districts through COVID recovery.
Remote instruction, data privacy and report cards can all be leveraged to help families navigate online learning and other aspects of education’s new normal.
The Data Quality Campaign has released a series of resources this summer to guide leaders in using data effectively in the coming school year:
Assessing online learning
Supporting Students While Learning at Home: Individual Student Data and the COVID-19 Crisis should help educators and families tailor instruction to each student’s online learning needs.
This resource recommends leaders take the following near- and long-term steps:
- Prioritize access to student data. Parents and teachers taking on unprecedented responsibilities must have access to timely and easy-to-understand data to support student learning. One way to achieve this is through parent portals.
- Embed data literacy into ongoing professional development. To gather useful data, districts must provide teachers with professional development in how to use assessments in online learning. This includes teacher preparation programs. In a recent Data Quality Campaign poll, 46%t of teachers reported that they had not received training on assessing student learning remotely.
- Address the unmet data access needs of parents and educators. States and districts can work together to improve or develop secure data tools that better serve families. This work could include building learner profiles.
- Improve data access for everyone who plays a role in supporting students. Along with parents and teachers, data can also be leveraged by afterschool the providers, healthcare providers, and counselors who work with students.
Next resource: Ensuring privacy and security when sharing more data ’
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