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New Book Provides Roadmap for Educators to Analyze Assessment Data

A new book published this week by the Harvard Education Press offers clear and careful steps to assist educators attempting to analyze data mounting from student achievement results and accountability requirements. Data Wise: A Step-by-step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning, edited by Academic Dean and Thompson Professor Richard Murnane, Lecturer Kathryn Parker Boudett, and doctoral student Elizabeth A City, provides a solid blueprint of what to do with the increasing quantitative information educators face.

Through this book, educators can learn how to capture teachers' knowledge, foster collaboration, identify obstacles to change, enhance school culture and climate, and improve students' results from data analysis.

"The step-by-step process described in this invaluable book has helped me engage my faculty in lively, frank, and productive discussions about our student assessment results," said Janet Palmer Owens, principal of Mason Pilot School in Boston. "Now we are able to make the connections between data and instruction in ways that improve teaching and learning systematically throughout the school."

Murnane, an economist, focuses his research on the relationships between education and the economy, teacher labor markets, the determinants of children's achievement, and strategies for making schools more effective. Since 2001, he has been helping the Boston Public Schools central office in improving support of efforts to learn from student assessment results.

Boudett researches and teaches educators to effectively use data through a yearlong workshop, Using Student Assessment Data to Improve Instruction, at HGSE. The course offers educators a systematic approach for allowing data analysis to inform teaching and learning and supports school teams in creating data analyses and action plans for improving instruction. Prior to joining the HGSE faculty, Boudett worked as a consultant to the Boston Plan for Excellence, where she investigated Boston schools on the forefront of successful data use and helped synthesize lessons learned from their experiences.

Elizabeth A. City teaches aspiring principals in Boston's School Leadership Institute and is currently a doctoral student at HGSE.

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