Teachers Know Best—Making Data Work

With more data than ever available in the classroom, the challenge is making it work—for teachers and for students.

In this video accompanying the Gates Foundation’s Teachers Know Best: Making Data Work report, educators discuss how they work with data, and how they’d like to see the digital tools that support its use improve. “A lot of what we do tends to be very much telling someone what happened. We’re not very good at predicting at what might happen, and we’re even less good at saying at what we should do given what we think might happen,” one Chicago educator says. “Ideally, we’d like to get to the what should we do.”

The intent of Making Data Work is to drill down to help educators, school leaders, and product developers better understand the challenges teachers face when working with this critical segment of digital instructional tools. More than 4,600 teachers from a nationally representative sample were surveyed about their use of data to drive instruction and the use of these tools.

Visit www.teachersknowbest.org or download the report.