This Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation publication serves as a follow up to Teachers Know Best (2014), a publication purposed with sharing teachers’ and students’ views on digital instructional tools with educators and product developers. In Making Data Work (2015), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focuses on teachers’ use of data in conjunction with digital tools to personalize instruction for their students. Researchers found that 93% of teachers regularly used digital tools to guide instruction, but 67% were not fully satisfied with the tools’ effectiveness. For example, teachers report using multiple products to collect various pieces of student information that must be manually aggregated-a time consuming process. Based on these findings, the Foundation proposes several recommendations for different audiences:

• Product developers (Ideas to better understand and meet teachers’ needs)
• Teachers (Ideas to increase collaboration and learning about opportunities to leverage technology)
• School leaders (Ideas about learning from innovators and investing in professional development that helps teachers use data-driven instruction)
• Funders (Ideas about broadening the conversation and encouraging solutions)

These recommendations are intended to enable teachers to better use data and digital technology to drive instruction.

Read it here.