ABSTRACT
School-based decision-making teams are frequently charged with the task of evaluating academic-performance data to identify struggling students, and developing student-support interventions. The reasons students struggle in school, however, are often related to a broader range of factors that transcend students’ academic performance. This chapter describes how a school-wide decision-making team in one elementary school used academic and nonacademic data in its work to identify and support struggling students. This case evidences how multiple forms of data—including behavioral, socio-emotional, and health data—in addition to academic data, can be used by teams to better understand how and why students struggle in school, and to develop interventions that are better aligned with student needs. The authors of this chapter catalogue the types of data used by the team, describe ways in which these data were used by team members, and discuss how a problem-solving orientation to data use engenders a more integrated and holistic orientation toward data use by teams. Findings of this investigation are framed as promising practices and included: 1) the potential for using multiple forms of academic and nonacademic data by data use teams, 2) the team’s use of a problem-solving approach to integrate data across sources for the purpose of engaging in meaningful inquiry, and 3) the nature of the team’s organization, including its interdisciplinary membership, which served to promote effective data use.
