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Data Fluency Incentives for Educators

According to the South Carolina Department of Education, “Data literacy is the ability to gather, interpret, and use multiple data sources effectively to improve student learning. Data literacy is a habit and growth-oriented mindset that is part of the culture of a school or school district. Modeling and eliciting data literate behaviors during whole-school conversations can begin building the kind of culture for which instructional leaders and teachers are able to design and select better assessments, make more accurate inferences about student learning, gauge student thinking, and engage in productive inquiry about how students learn and what instruction will help them learn.”

Data literacy is at the heart of effective decisionmaking in classrooms, schools, districts, and communities. All students, including those in need of acceleration, remediation, or intervention, provide teachers, counselors, interventionists, coaches, and administrators with a true wealth of data in various forms. Teachers and administrators who excel at using and learning from whole-child data approaches (academic, social, emotional, behavioral) to better meet the needs of their students, schools, and communities should be recognized as local thought leaders, change makers, and innovators.