It’s widely accepted that increased use of edtech will continue after COVID-19. These tools will end up producing data that could be invaluable for educators if harnessed in the right way. In this article, I address the question - how can educators and school leaders put all this data and information to good use?
Data pre-pandemic
In 2019, pre-pandemic, a survey of over 3,000 teaching staff showed that one in five head teachers believed that data collection should be less frequent and 41% of teachers felt their school was collecting more data than could be used. The same survey showed that 30% of staff thought that data was not being used in a constructive way to improve results.
It’s clear from these findings that staff do not feel the data is being put to good use. Despite its benefits many seem reluctant to take advantage of what is at their fingertips.
So why are so many teachers data-averse?
Firstly, manually collecting and recording data has historically been a headache. Data records have typically involved triple-entry: teachers record their students’ test scores for themselves, they submit them to a head of school who then records and submits whole-school data to regulatory bodies such as Ofsted.