Classroom data collection for teachers’ data-informed practice

ABSTRACT

Research indicates that data-informed practice helps teachers change their teaching and promotes teacher professional development (TPD). Although educational data are often collected from digital spaces, in-action evidence from physical spaces is seldom gathered, providing an incomplete view of the classroom reality. Also, most learning analytics tools focus on learners and do not explicitly collect or analyse teaching data. To support teacher-led inquiries in TPD, the authors’ Design-Based Research explores the feasibility and effects of teachers actively collecting, with the help of technology, data about their classroom practice and the possible impact of such data on their own teaching. Based on an online survey (N = 94), prior research literature and feedback from teachers (N = 11), the authors demonstrate the feasibility of such data collection and suggest design principles for classroom data-collection tools as, besides usability and ease of use, they also detected interest in customisation, triggering teacher interest and inclusion of teaching data.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom data collection
• classroom observation tools
• teaching analytics
• teacher professional development
• technology design principles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [Grant 669074 (CEITER)]; Project „TU TEE - Tallinn University as a promoter of intelligent lifestyle“ under activity A5 in the Tallinn University Centre of Excellence in Educational Innovation [2014-2020.4.01.16-0033].

Notes on contributors

Merike Saar

Merike Saar is a Junior Researcher at the School of Educational Sciences, Tallinn University (Estonia) and a doctoral candidate at the School of Digital Technologies, Tallinn University. Her research interests include learning and teaching analytics, learning design, technologies for classroom use and teacher professional development.

Luis P. Prieto

Luis P. Prieto is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Educational Sciences in Tallinn University (Estonia). His research interests include learning analytics, especially multimodal learning and teaching analytics, computer-supported collaborative learning, learning design, the study of teacher orchestration and their application for teacher professional development.

María Jesús Rodríguez Triana

María Jesús Rodríguez-Triana received her PhD in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Valladolid (Spain) in 2014, joining the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She is a Senior Researcher at the School of Digital Technologies in Tallinn University (Estonia). Her research interests have a strong focus on classroom orchestration and teacher inquiry supported via learning analytics, including aspects such as pedagogically grounded and multimodal analytics, ethics and privacy.