ABSTRACT
Some of the people driving people all hard into the future on the back of new technologies appear to assume that if they all focus hard enough on information, then they will get where they want to go most directly. Contemporary policy in teacher education is clearly accelerating its attention to issues of measurement, information systems for archiving and analyzing data, and data use. The salience of issues related to data and data use in state and national policy conversations has also led to a renewal of interest in problems of measurement and program evaluation in teacher education. Information systems in teacher education do not stand outside of the webs of meaning that program members construct about their work, both individually and collectively. Developing and sustaining collaborative data use practices also requires strategic organizational support. Several studies do support the assumption that data use can matter to efforts at program improvement in teacher education.
