Strategic Data Project Convening 2019

Researchers and policymakers examining school choice often assume that parents have well-ordered and stable preferences when it comes to their most important decisions, including where to send their children for school. A common assumption is that parents will be able to make the “correct” choice as long as they have access to complete information through school finders or “school shopping websites” (e.g., Levin 2002). But preferences may be more malleable than many assume, and parents might be influenced by the intentional or unintentional decisions that designers make about how to present information—how much detail to include, what attributes to describe, how to format the data shown for each attribute, and how to sort the options.
In this session, participants will engage with the findings of a study examining how various information displays changed parents’ decisions about which school they’d prefer for their children, and in some cases also affected the extent to which parents could easily understand information about schools and have a satisfying experience using each school shopping website. After hearing about how design choices can meaningfully increase the weight parents place on academic quality when selecting a school (compared to other attributes, such as a school’s distance from home), attendees will examine their own school guides and unpack how relatively simple and inexpensive design choices can produce meaningful changes in how parents interpret, process and use information about schools.
To prepare for this session, please submit an example of a local school guide here. This could be from a public agency, or a private resource like U.S. News & World Report.

Creating cultures of continuous improvement is no easy feat. This session will focus on three case studies that present strategies for shifting mindsets and building data culture. First, Kevin Hoffman from Aspire Public Schools will share Aspire’s efforts to become a learning organization steeped in inquiry by using the framework in Learning to Improve. Next, Kristen Rohanna from the UCLA Partner School Network will share how they strategically encourage teachers in their network to collect asset-based student data for their disciplined inquiry work. The purpose of these data is to shift educator mindsets around what it means to engage students in mathematics. Finally, Karen Tzong and Sharon Bi from Santa Ana Unified School District will share their low-lift strategy “Data Espressos” to engage stakeholders in data inquiry and initiate changes in their agency.

Join SDP Alumni for a critical conversations session about studies, analyses, and experiments that failed to create usable data, were never conducted, were never presented due to organizational or political pressure, or evolved into a completely different study. Rarely do we talk candidly about all the times we failed, and how we overcame barriers to better use data to inform policy and practice. At SDP’s 10th Anniversary, there is no better time to bring forward some of these "failures" and talk about how they resulted in new learnings, generated new practices, and spurred new research. Attendees will leave the session with examples of “failures” across five agencies that resulted in new research or policies that moved the conversation forward. The presenters will share their experiences of how they created action from failure, and how it catalyzed later success. This discussion will highlight strategies for advancing rigorous data analysis to improve the quality of decision-making in educational agencies. This session seeks to leave the attendee with a greater understanding of how the research process unfolds, and how unexpected roadblocks can result in stronger results down the line. The audience will be given time to reflect on their own challenges, brainstorm strategies to work around barriers, and develop next steps for addressing similar challenges in their agencies, in addition to having ample time to ask and answer questions.