Analyzing Data for Instructional Decision Making
Demonstration of Proficiency
By successfully completing this assessment, you will demonstrate your proficiency in the following competency and assessment scoring guide criteria:
Competency: Analyze student data to identify and address educational problems.
Analyze qualitative and quantitative data and triangulate data to pinpoint areas of strength and deficiency.
Identify strengths and deficiencies in overall class performance as supported through both quantitative and qualitative data.
Identify strengths and deficiencies in individual student performance as supported through both quantitative and qualitative data.
Explain additional instruction and resources, supported by the data, to enrich, redirect, and remediate the learning experience.
Instructions
Scenario
The following scenario is the background for your assessment and the data that is provided.
Your students (in a hypothetical eighth-grade geography class) took a test and completed a 3–5 page essay on the topic. Before your students can successfully move on to the next lesson within this unit, you have to determine what they need to do in order to achieve proficiency of the four standards below:
Standard 1: Students describe how humans impact the environment and how the environment impacts humans.
Standard 2: Students describe how to represent geographical information, such as spatial distributions and the location of places and their characteristics, in different graphic forms including large-scale and small-scale maps that use cartographic conventions.
Standard 3: Students analyze the impact of geography on available resources and the impact of available resources on the quality of life.
Standard 4: Students propose an actionable response to a geographical challenge and explain the expected outcomes of the proposed intervention.
Look carefully at the standards and the data to determine:
What gaps in knowledge are evident?
Are student ready for enrichment (enhanced instruction and resources to extend learning) around the standards?
Do students need remediation (additional instruction and resources) or redirection (additional guidance and resources)?
Assessment
Use the data in the following resources as the basis for your assessment. Submit your assessment as one 3–6 page document.
Analyze the performance data (qualitative and quantitative data) using the information provided information in the Data for Assessment resource above. When analyzing quantitative data, you can identify mean, mode, and median, or, if you are ready, you are welcome to do advanced statistical analysis to determine overall student performance based on learning standards, gaps in knowledge, areas of strength, and areas where enrichment, redirection, or remediation is warranted.
When analyzing qualitative data, you will want to come up with labels for the narrative data based on the learning standards and then determine which students fall into that label/category.
Your analysis will result in a 1–2 page report on the overall class performance and a 1–2 page assessment performance report for any two students in the class.
Your reports should include a rich narrative that refers to the criterion descriptors in the geography paper rubric, and you should consider percentage correct and/or stanine scores on individual standards and on overall achievement for each of the two students and for the class as a whole.
