Eclectic Technology

Data is big in education today and it appears to be the driving force behind school reform. Today I was exploring the Michael &Susan Dell Foundation and discovered a series of articles they are running that looks at 10 education data myths. This post is an overview of the series they are running. A list of the 10 education myths is below, but you may want to spend some time of this site exploring materials that are available to school districts that help teachers access and use data to plan daily lesson, help students achieve goals, have productive conversations with parents, identify trends and collaborate with collegues.

So what are those myths?

1. Data = test scores

2. Data-driven instruction is a new concept

3. Data-rich is the same as data-driven

4. Software = The solution

5. Teachers are just data consumers

6. More data creates more work for teachers

7. Tools alone lead to student growth

8. Test data is a good tool for evaluating teachers

9. Classroom data is a tool for teachers

10. Data-driven instruction limits teachers creativity. 

"What is learning analytics – as a field of study, as a practice, as a set of tools, as a way to collect and analyze educational data? What are we tracking, and to what end?

This article provides a working definition and then explores a number of questions, raising the importation notion that learning analytics should be used to help us support "student learning."

A number of issues are also raised such as "Do we tell students what data we collect and how we are going to use it? Do students dontrol and do they own their learning data?"