by Calsue Murray

Created on: December 25, 2008

Data-driven Instruction

Currently, public education in the United States is viewed as experiencing a pitiful present, after having undergone a painful recent past. The future of public education is seen as being less than promising. Teachers are being told that a way to make the future of education more promising is to begin to make their teaching more "data-driven." A completely understandable, and totally agreed upon, definition of "data-driven instruction" has not yet been set forth.

It has been said that, "data-driven instruction" really means instruction based upon the most accurate "data-driven assessment" of students' capabilities. It is being maintained, by many, that data obtained by teacher assessments, done informally, can be more accurate and reliable than data obtained by standardized testing.

No matter how the most accurate and reliable data is obtained, it is apparent that teaching, based upon the most accurate data obtainable, requires that individualized and differentiated methods of teaching become the norm in classrooms. Mass instructional techniques do not permit teachers to teach to the widely diverse learning needs of their students.

This is not new information. Classroom teachers have struggled with the problem of trying to teach to the widely diverse learning abilities of numbers of students, simultaneously, ever since schools were established.

Never before has there been so much pressure placed on teachers to use commercially-prepared texts, manuals, workbooks and programs that to not allow them to use their own instincts, know how and ingenuity to create materials and devise teaching methods tailored to the individual ability levels of their students.

Recently, numbers of public officials, politicians and persons of influence, who lack direct classroom experience, have become influential enough to mandate the use of impersonal, mass-production methods. Increasingly, the use of ineffectual instruction materials is being forced upon public school teachers. Honest appraisal of the recent past of public school education substantiates that these are among the major reasons that painful failures began to occur so frequently.

The same factors that caused recent past failures in our nation's schools have been allowed to continue into the present and cause the pitifully lessened quality of teaching that now persist, in so many public schools.

Recent encouragements for teachers to base the lessons that they present on reliable data about the ability

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