By J. Cosgrove
In her excellent article Data Don’t Drive, Alicia Dowd reminds us that data alone won’t lead to continuous improvement or in fact any improvement at all. I remember sitting in a summer training session at the University of Michigan Assessment Institute and listening to Richard Alford discuss the Craft of Inquiry. It was the end of the day and with all apologies to Dr. Alfred, I must admit I was thinking more about crafting dinner plans than inquiry, but then he made a very simple, yet powerful statement: ”You don’t make the pig fatter by simply weighing it every day”.
Assessment, evaluation, data collection—whatever you want to call it—must be more than keeping score. If we don’t learn something and then take action from what we learn, we are simply recording data for the sake of recording data. As we are further inundated with the call for accountability data from all stakeholders, including students, parents, legislators, accrediting bodies, and funding agencies, we would do well to remember that there are two sides to the data. We need to look past what others say we must collect and engage in a meaningful culture of inquiry. People engaged in the development of key public questions and the thoughtful interpretation of data will drive continuous improvement. We should expand our data collection and evaluation efforts to determine not only what works, but why it works.