Using assessment data to empower practice

Register your interest

 This workshop series is accredited for continuing professional development (4.5 CPD hours), with certification on successful completion.

Understanding how to use assessment data effectively is an increasingly important element underpinning teaching and learning. Used well, data has the potential to empower practice, by giving practitioners the confidence to understand individual students, student cohorts, and the quality of the assessments themselves.

This workshop series will help you to understand and use assessment-related data to inform practice and develop an effective data culture in your school. Taken consecutively over three weeks, each session builds on the learning from the last, with a chance to implement and reflect on the content during the weeks in between. 

The workshops have been designed for middle and senior school leaders, as well as other teaching practitioners who want to:

• Utilise assessment data to empower their practice, for example by understanding student progress, identifying gaps in knowledge, or evaluating assessment quality
• Understand the benefits and limitations of data they collect and use in their work

It will be of particular benefit to those within educational institutions wanting to understand the uses, opportunities, and limitations of assessment data, and improve how that data is used in the classroom.

Workshop dates

Course outline

This workshop series is designed to develop practitioners' utilisation of data for three main purposes:

• Using assessments to draw inferences about student ability
• Understanding how well an assessment has performed
• Establishing an effective data culture in your school/institution

Over three sessions we will address each of these purposes in turn, using real-life examples from the world of education to build participant capacities in understanding and interpreting assessment data.

• Week 1 - We will consider the various steps involved in the collection and interpretation of assessment data. You'll also be introduced to some of the fundamental aspects of the data itself, and to explore where opportunities and challenges may arise
• Week 2 - We will move on to looking at how data from assessments can be interpreted effectively, and how this can in turn influence actions. Firstly we'll look at what assessment data can tell us about the students who took the test, and then what it tells us about the test itself
• Week 3 - This session focuses on encouraging a coherent and fruitful data culture within a school, or any other institution where assessment data is utilised for improving practice or outcomes

Key learning outcomes

By the end of the three sessions you will have:

• Understood the purposes and uses of assessment data, and key terminology
• Interpreted common outputs from assessments, and considered how they can inform practice
• Discovered some of the statistics that can tell us more about assessments themselves, such as facility values, discrimination indices and reliability coefficients
• Used your knowledge and understanding of assessment data to identify impactful ways to positively influence your school or institution