At Your Fingertips: Using Everyday Data To Improve Schools

This book discusses how to use everyday data to create strategies for educational improvement in schools. It provides users with a process for building a performance indicator system, identifying the most important aspects of a school's innovational efforts and traps to avoid that may lead to misinterpretation of data. The introduction identifies reasons and processes for developing a performance indicator system. The next section, "Getting Started," discusses how to assemble a team of education stakeholders, and explains the benefits of collaborative work as opposed to individual efforts. The following sections discuss the various steps in creating a performance indicator system and utilizing educational data, including: (1) establishing goals; (2) identifying related outcomes, practices, and inputs; (3) determining data sources and indicators; (4) examining the data; (5) setting performance targets; and (6) monitoring performance over time. Each section provides worksheets for user input, with duplicate worksheets at the end of the book. Appendices include a discussion on stakeholder groups, a sample invitation letter and agenda, and resources for developing new data sources and data collection instruments. Contains 43 references. (YKH)