Data Management in School: A Way To Increase ABM Learners’ Achievement

Lee Welien Jose Atayde

As educators face growing emphasis on local accountability measures to increase student success, the use of data has become more important to how more educators assess their activities and track students ' academic success.

Recent improvements in transparency and assessment practices have provided educators with access to a variety of student-level data, and the abundance of such data has driven many to seek to improve the role of data in directing teaching and strengthening student performance.

Data offers a means to determine what students are studying and the degree to which students are making strides towards their goals. However, to make sense of the data requires definitions, explanations and interpretive frames of reference.

Using data systematically to ask questions and obtain insight about student progress is a logical way to monitor continuous improvement and tailor instruction to the needs of each student. Armed with data and the means to harness the information data can provide educators to make instructional changes aimed at improving student achievement such as prioritizing instructional time, targeting additional individual instruction for students who are struggling with particular topics, more easily identifying individual students’ strengths and instructional interventions that can help students continue to progress, gauging the instructional effectiveness of classroom lessons, refining instructional methods, examining school wide data to consider whether and how to adapt the curriculum based on information about students’ strengths and weaknesses.

The responsibility for effective data use lies with district supervisors, school administrators, and classroom teachers.

The use of data for school management purposes, rewarding teacher performance, and determining appropriate ways to schedule the school day is beyond the scope of this guide. Schools typically collect data on students’ attendance, behavior, activities, coursework, and grades, as well as a range of administrative data concerning staffing, scheduling, and financing.

Teachers should use data from multiple sources to set goals, make curricular and instructional choices, and allocate instructional time.

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The author is Teacher II at Marawi High School