Abstract:

Latvia is undergoing a nation-wide curriculum reform in general education, with an aim to help students develop 21st century skills. The reform’s goal is to focus on the development of transversal skills, complex learning outcomes and deeper learning. To reach the reform’s goal, deep change in how school is operating, and functioning is needed. One of the schools as learning organization dimensions is data driven decision making and continuous improvement, using both complex data and complex analysis. There is a great amount of data being generated at the national and school level, but most teachers feel that the data are not easy to use for the instructional decisions.

Schools are looking at the raw score comparison between schools as not fair, both from the perspective of starting position and context factors in evaluating school quality and comparing school performance.

At the moment, students in Latvia participate in the following large scale assessments: in Grade 3 they take part in national assessment in Maths, and Latvian Language; in Grade 6 – in Maths, Latvian Language, and Sciences; and at the end of the compulsory education, all Grade 9 students take exams in Maths, Latvian Language, English Language, and History.

This research aims to pilot the newly developed framework that is designed to enable schools to get from the stage of “having data” to the stage of “using data as a meaningful source of information to better teaching and learning”. The framework covers such aspects as large scale student assessment data, student surveys, teacher performance, elements of school leadership practices. As a result, authors arrive at the conclusion that the developed framework increases the likelihood of schools being able to use data in a purposeful and effective way and design an action plan for student achievement improvement.

Keywords:

Data-driven decision making, framework for data analysis, school improvement.