PRESERVICE TEACHERS: RECOGNIZING THE STORY IN ASSESSMENT DATA AND ACTING ON IT FOR THE BENEFIT OF STUDENT SUCCESS

Successful teachers must be able to disaggregate and analyze student assessment data in order to plan for future teaching and meet the individual needs of all students. This can be a challenging task for any teacher and it is an especially challenging professional task for preservice teachers, who often have difficulty looking beyond the final outcome of an assessment to recognize the story the data illustrates about students. This paper is the result of faculty-conducted action research that explored a path toward increasing preservice teachers’ attention to the story of data. The context for instruction was an integrated block of methods courses in an elementary program where preservice teachers participated in units of instruction. At the conclusion of a multi-disciplinary unit, preservice teachers were asked to put on their teacher hats and evaluate mock sets of student assessment data in order to identify learning goals that needed to be revisited. From their analysis, they identified patterns and based on the patterns they organized small-groups for focused instruction. Once this task was completed, the preservice teachers designed and taught lessons that targeted specific student needs. After the lesson delivery, preservice teachers again addressed assessment data to see if students had met the learning goals and they then considered whether further teaching might be required. This instructional activity provided preservice teachers with an in-depth opportunity to experience a plan-teach-assess-reflect model. In addition, it helped to promote and clarify the iterative nature of assessment. This paper will explore the process as well as discuss challenges and benefits identified in the implementation of this model with preservice teachers.