Data-driven Accountability Research Articles

Networking in Academic Medicine: Keeping an Eye on Equity.

Networking in Academic Medicine: Keeping an Eye on Equity.

Teaching English to the Test: Why Does Negative Washback Exist within Secondary Education in Bangladesh?

ABSTRACTThis article reports on a study that was carried out to explore the factors that contribute to a negative washback effect on English language teaching (ELT) in secondary schools in Bangladesh. Twelve secondary school teachers were interviewed to understand their perspectives on which factors influenced their pedagogical choices. The interview data were supplemented with secondary material, including official documents, media resources, and NGO (non-government organisation) reports. Drawing on a body of washback research and the empirical data, we constructed the basis for the argument that test-external socio-political and contextual factors may play a substantial role in shaping the nature of washback. It is suggested that emphasising a testing-teaching causal relationship may be overly simplistic, as language teaching may be affected not only by assessment factors but also by a complex of social-psychological, political, economic, and data-driven accountability factors in which testing and teaching are embedded. These insights have implications for scholars in language testing and assessment, policy makers, program designers, and managers in contexts where language tests are believed to affect language instruction negatively.

EdTPA and Accountability: Strategies for Mentoring Teacher Candidates

Abstract This article examines and discusses 7 years of data collection and personal experience implementing and navigating the teacher candidate assessment called edTPA (educational Teacher Performance Assessment). Visual arts education has its own discipline-specific assessment, whose development and implementation is not without controversy in our field. The challenges we face as art educators teaching in education prep programs need to be made transparent as data-driven accountability policies continue to grow, impacting curricular and programmatic values. Practical strategies for teacher prep programs in edTPA early adoption or piloting phases are shared and discussed.

Towards Effective Workforce Management: Hiring Algorithms, Big Data-driven Accountability Systems, and Organizational Performance Social Sciences, Sociology, Management and complex organizations

Towards Effective Workforce Management: Hiring Algorithms, Big Data-driven Accountability Systems, and Organizational Performance Social Sciences, Sociology, Management and complex organizations

Towards Effective Workforce Management: Hiring Algorithms, Big Data-driven Accountability Systems, and Organizational Performance Social Sciences, Sociology, Management and complex organizations

Towards Effective Workforce Management: Hiring Algorithms, Big Data-driven Accountability Systems, and Organizational Performance Social Sciences, Sociology, Management and complex organizations

“Losing the Humanity of the Street”: Retired Police Officer Narratives of the Evolution of Low-level Enforcement in New York City

Low-level enforcement activities such as pedestrian and traffic stops, the issuance of criminal court summonses (tickets or citations), and misdemeanor arrests comprise the vast majority of police-citizen encounters relative to the policing of more serious, felony-level offenses. The complexities of these activities—particularly from the perspectives of the police officers who carry them out—have received relatively little scholarly attention. In an effort to more fully understand the nuances of low-level enforcement, in particular how such activities have changed over time and how police officers have experienced such changes, in-depth interviews were conducted with a small sample of retired New York Police Department (NYPD) officers. Findings shed light on how officers understand and experience proactive policing tactics and the pressures associated with data-driven accountability. The implications of this research for improving police-community relations are explored.

How Data Drive Early Word Learning: A Cross-Linguistic Waiting Time Analysis

The extent to which word learning is delayed by maturation as opposed to accumulating data is a longstanding question in language acquisition. Further, the precise way in which data influence learning on a large scale is unknown—experimental results reveal that children can rapidly learn words from single instances as well as by aggregating ambiguous information across multiple situations. We analyze Wordbank, a large cross-linguistic dataset of word acquisition norms, using a statistical waiting time model to quantify the role of data in early language learning, building off Hidaka ( 2013 ). We find that the model both fits and accurately predicts the shape of children’s growth curves. Further analyses of model parameters suggest a primarily data-driven account of early word learning. The parameters of the model directly characterize both the amount of data required and the rate at which informative data occurs. With high statistical certainty, words require on the order of ∼ 10 learning instances, which occur on average once every two months. Our method is extremely simple, statistically principled, and broadly applicable to modeling data-driven learning effects in development.

Data, democracy and school accountability: Controversy over school evaluation in the case of DeVasco High School

Debate over the closure of DeVasco High School shows that data-driven accountability was a methodological and administrative processes that produced both transparency and opacity. Data, when applied to a system of accountability, produced new capabilities and powers, and as such were political. It created second-hand representations of important objects of analysis. Using these representations administrators spoke on behalf of the school, the student and the classroom, without having to rely on the first-person accounts of students, teachers or principals. They empowered one group—central city administrators—over another—teachers and principals. After analyzing the form these policies took, this article concludes that it is necessary to rethink the processes that create visibility and invisibility. Public data obscured the voices, experiences and collective traumas of students and faculty within the school. A narrow focus on activities within the schools rendered invisible the structural decisions made by the Department of Education in New York City—to favor small schools over large, comprehensive ones. In order to create understanding, and a sense of common purpose, those who are spoken for in simplified data must also be given the opportunity to debate the representations of their performance and quality.

Entanglement

This paper is based on driver-less car technology as currently being developed by Google and Tesla, two companies that amplify their work in the media. More specifically, I focus on the moment of real and imagined crashes involving driver-less cars, and argue that the narrative of ‘ethics of driver-less cars’ indicates a shift in the construction of ethics, as an outcome of machine learning rather than a framework of values. Through applications of the ‘Trolley Problem’, among other tests, ethics has been transformed into a valuation based on processing of big data. Thus ethics-as-software enables what I refer to as big data-driven accountability. In this formulation, ‘accountability’ is distinguished from ‘responsibility’; responsibility implies intentionality and can only be assigned to humans, whereas accountability includes a wide net of actors and interactions (in Simon). ‘Transparency’ is one of the more established, widely acknowledged mechanisms for accountability; based on the belief that seeing into a system delivers the truth of that system and thereby a means to govern it. There are however limitations to this mechanism in the context of algorithmic transparency (Ananny and Crawford).

Radio frequency identification–enabled capabilities in a healthcare context: An exploratory study

Increasingly, the adoption and use of radio frequency identification systems in hospital settings is gaining prominence. However, despite the transformative impact that radio frequency identification has in healthcare settings, few studies have examined how and why this change may occur. The purpose of this study is to systematically understand how radio frequency identification can transform work practices in an operational process that directly impacts cost and operational efficiency and indirectly contributes to impacting patient safety and quality of care. We leverage an interdisciplinary framework to explore the contextual characteristics that shape the assimilation of radio frequency identification in healthcare settings. By linking the use of radio frequency identification with specific contextual dimensions in healthcare settings, we provide a data-driven account of how and why radio frequency identification can be useful in inventory management in this setting. In doing so, we also contribute to recent work by information systems scholars who argue for a reconfiguration of conventional assumptions regarding the role of technology in contemporary organizations.

La Educación in Room 320: Toward a Theory of Care-Based Resistance in the Context of Neoliberal School Reform

Background/Context Research has illustrated that current neoliberal educational policy trends, such as data-driven accountability, the use of Common Core-aligned scripted curricula, and punitive classroom management approaches, have undermined teacher autonomy and compromised teachers’ ability to build meaningful relationships with their students. Nowhere is the impact of these policy trends felt more than in low-performing urban schools in the midst of intense reform. Research on the resistance practices of teachers in the context of reform frequently presents a negative conception of teacher resistance as a psychological reaction to change. Other more positive conceptions of resistance provide insight into the political and professional motivations for resistance. Little research to date, however, illuminates the subtle forms of resistance some teachers practice as they “push back” against the deleterious impact of neoliberal education policy on student–teacher relations. Purpose The study examined the ways in which urban teachers negotiate and “push back” against neoliberal reform. This article reports on what the author calls care-based resistance, a form of teacher resistance that is rooted in an ethic of authentic care and culturally responsive pedagogy. Research Design This study draws on a larger critical ethnographic study of policy enactments in two urban schools experiencing intense reform. In the current study, the author draws on critical policy studies and empirical studies of neoliberal school reform to explicate the transformation of teachers’ work and the ways in which current policy compromises authentically caring teacher–student relationships. The author then draws on care theory, theories of resistance, and culturally responsive pedagogy to develop the concept of care-based resistance. Finally, the author uses the method of portraiture to present an illustrative example of care-based resistance based on the practices of one bilingual science teacher. Conclusions The analysis and illustrative portrait of care-based resistance help to challenge the mainstream constructs of teacher resistance found in the organizational change and school leadership literatures that describe resistance in negative terms as an obstruction to school improvement. The author also distinguishes care-based resistance from other forms of teacher resistance that stem from teachers’ political or professional stances. Alternatively, a theory of care-based resistance provides a framework for gaining insight into the ways some teachers push back against the dominant ethos of reform in order to be culturally responsive and create a protected space for their students in which authentically caring relationships can flourish. The analysis draws attention to micro-level cultural practices and nuanced acts of teacher resistance that are often overlooked and sometimes even perceived as accommodation but that are indeed important modes of resistance in our current policy context. “Oh, you can just forget project-based learning! It doesn't fit. We have this new [scripted] program, you know. Really, there's no time for anything…. It's just no fun anymore. The pressure is tremendous, and let me tell you, it [the new curriculum] doesn't really always make sense for our kids. They didn't have it last year or the year before, so they don't really have the proper foundation for this stuff.”— Doris, veteran teacher during a discussion on how things have changed over the last 10 years

“I Skim and Find the Answers”

The authors present findings from a data-driven account in which they followed ten fifth-grade students receiving intervention in reading through Georgia's test-based grade retention policy. Under the policy, the students had little confidence in themselves as readers and felt that reading test passages was unnecessary and difficult. Consequently, they read questions and skimmed passages for key words to find answers, with little success, thus reproducing their difficulties with reading. The authors suggest that teachers address students’ use of the search and destroy method of reading by learning how their students are actually reading, engaging students in discussions about what it means to read for a variety of purposes, and helping students understand when search and destroy is effective and when it is not. Through these recommendations the authors hope to offer reluctant readers an avenue to reconsider what it means to read and how one approaches texts.

Referent Accessibility of Appositive Constructions in the Spanish Press

The aim of this paper is to describe Spanish appositive constructions and to investigate the discourse role they assume in newspaper articles. Two types of appositive constructions are discussed: the specificational and the classificatory appositive constructions. The former present a relationship of secondary nominal predication and show a parallelism with copular structures. The latter are characterized by a relationship of non-restrictive modification. After describing the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of both structures, we offer a detailed discourse analysis of these appositive constructions in the Spanish written press. A corpus of 10,783 nominal expressions with human referents was compiled, of which a third represent appositive constructions. The data-driven account is based on the exhaustive analysis of these referents and aims at applying Ariel's accessibility theory (1990) to our data. Moreover, the purpose is to extend her referent accessibility scale with our appositive constru...

Principals as Bricoleurs

Purpose: The study investigates the ways in which principals engage with, and attend to, the data-driven accountability measures of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and local mandates. Theoretical framework: The study is framed with the notion of assemblage, a term often associated with actor-network theory (ANT)—a theory that focuses analytic attention on how disparate actors, material, and discursive practices come together to form dynamic associations. Within the assemblage, principals are situated as bricoleurs.Research methods and data: Data for analysis come from interviews conducted with 45 New York City principals between June 2005 and October 2008 as part of a larger ethnographic study examining NCLB, and a series of interviews with 12 of the 45 principals, conducted annually through March 2012. District surveys, various documents, and field notes of participant observation also inform the study. Findings: Principals play active policy roles in negotiating federal regulations and local initiatives, as well as selectively performing assessment and accountability mandates. Principals, who have often been cast in the media as either dupes of the state or as active resistors, negotiate and appropriate external accountability in innovative, sometimes savvy, ways. Implications for practice and research: Principals need to consider institutional circumstances and external accountability not as boundaries or constraints, but rather as available material with which to respond. Future research should aim to examine the ways in which principals engage with data and accountability demands via reflexive interactions with different types of knowledge, mediating artifacts, and methods.

Quality and accountability in the out‐of‐school‐time sector

In the fragmented out-of-school-time sector, defining and measuring quality in terms of staff behaviors at the point of service provides a common framework that can reduce obstacles to cross-sector and cross-program performance improvement efforts and streamline adoption of data-driven accountability policies. This chapter views the point of service, that is, the microsettings where adults and youth purposefully interact, as the critical unit of study because it is ubiquitous across out-of-school-time programs and because it is the place where key developmental experiences are intentionally delivered. However, because point-of-service behaviors are embedded within multilevel systems where managers set priorities and institutional incentives constrain innovation, effective quality interventions must contend with and attend to this broader policy environment. The Youth Program Quality Assessment (Youth PQA) is one of an emerging class of observational assessment tools that measure staff performances at the point of service and, depending on methodology of use, can help create the conditions that managers and youth workers need to accept, adopt, and sustain accountability initiatives. Observational assessment tools can be flexible enough to be used for program self-assessment (appropriate for low-stakes, non-normative learning purposes), external assessment (appropriate for higher stakes, normative comparisons, and performance accountability), and various hybrids that combine elements from each. We provide advice for decision makers regarding how to most effectively use the Youth PQA and similar measurement tools depending on the articulation of clear purposes for which accountability and improvement policies are enacted and effective sequencing of implementation.

Taking off Ideological Blinders: Lessons from the Start of a Study on Effective Teachers in High-Poverty Schools

For the fifty years since Brown v. Board of Education, educators have been trying to improve the education of children of color and children of the poor. Literally hundreds of programs and processes have been applied in schools. These programs have largely been evaluated by fidelity to implementatio n processes and procedures rather than by actual achievement results. Over the past ten years, several individuals, organizations, and laws have signaled an end to the era of process evaluation by concentrating on measuring results directly. We would count as one of these paradigm-changing events the publication of Lisa Delpit's book. Other People's Children (1995), which questioned the results of certain progressive educational methods with African-American children. Organizations such as the Education Trust, Just for Kids, and the National Center for Educational Accountability, and the standards movement have also coalesced to press for more data-driven accountability. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has begun to put the teeth into the accountability movement. It seeks to close the achievement gap by monitoring achievement results. When looking at the research on high-performing, high-poverty schools and national and state results, we had a question about the inside of the classroom. What are the characteristics of teachers and classrooms with high proportions of children of color and poverty who perform well? We were awarded a grant by the Haynes Eoundation to look at teachers who had the highest student performance inside high-poverty schools that were not yet high-performing. The

Hungarian palatal stop: phonological considerations and phonetic data

This study examines the movement trajectories of the dorsal tongue movements during symmetrical /VCa/ -sequences, where /V/ was one of the Hungarian long or short vowels /i,a,u/ and C either the voiceless palatal or velar stop consonants. General aims of this study were to deliver a data-driven account for (a) the evidence of the division between dorsality and coronality and (b) for the potential role coarticulatory factors could play for the relative frequency of velar palatalization processes in genetically unrelated languages. Results suggest a clear-cut demarcation between the behaviour of purely dorsal velars and the coronal palatals. Moreover, factors arising from a general movement economy might contribute to the palatalization processes mentioned.