Using Assessment to Improve Instruction

The Data Wise project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is designed to help schools turn student assessment data into a tool to improve instruction and turn the act of data analysis into a process that improves the organization, function and climate of schools. A step-by-step guide to this process, for schools and school districts, is described in the authors’ recent book, Data Wise, published by the Harvard Education Press.

• Collective responsibility for learning
  In order to re-frame the learner-centered problem as a problem of instruction, teachers must reflect on the link between instructional practice and student learning, rather than attribute learning difficulties to weak students or deficient home lives.
• A shared understanding of effective practice
  Before they are able to articulate a problem of practice, teachers must come to an understanding of what effective instruction for the identified learning problem would look like.
• Classrooms open to teacher colleagues for observation and analysis
  In order to articulate a problem of practice teachers must make use of instructional data which they collect through observations of their colleagues’ classrooms and contrast current practice with their shared expectation of effective instruction for the identified learning problem.

he group of Harvard faculty, graduate students and school leaders from the Boston Public Schools who designed Data Wise envisioned the process of learning to use data constructively as one that could also serve as a toe-hold for the overwhelming and amorphous task of instructional improvement. In a series of seminars led by HGSE Professor Richard Murnane, Lecturer Kathryn Boudett, and doctoral student Elizabeth City, the group developed an eight-step Data Wise cycle as a means to help school leaders organize the work of school improvement around a process that has specific, manageable steps.Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE)


"Before schools can respond to external pressure for increased academic performance, they must transform themselves from atomized, incoherent organizations to ones in which faculty share an explicit set of norms and expectations about what good instructional practice looks like." HGSE Professor Richard Elmore


Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning, edited by Kathryn Parker Boudett, Elizabeth A. City, and Richard J. Murnane (2005), is published by the Harvard Education Press.