|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Grunwald Survey
Benefits, Challenges Highlight Technology Needs
 |
Most school leaders believe that technology provides their schools with a wide variety of benefits, especially on the administrative side. Indeed, school leaders see technology mainly as a tool to improve productivity and efficiency: 74 percent say technology provides timely data for decision making; 71 percent say it improves support staff efficiency; 71 percent say it increases administrators' productivity; 70 percent say it improves communications among parents, teachers and the community; and 61 percent say it increases teacher productivity.
School leaders do, however, also cite important benefits from technology that affect student learning. More than twothirds believe that technology motivates students (68 percent) and provides them with important life skills (67 percent). Smaller but majority percentages of school leaders believe technology levels the playing field for students in a variety of ways, including addressing the needs of disabled students (60 percent), helping educators individualize instruction (52 percent) and promoting academic equity (51 percent).
By contrast, school leaders in only four out of 10 districts (41 percent) believe technology helps raise student test scores. Leaders in key groups of schools do believe technology plays this focal role, including 50 percent of the poorest school districts, 50 percent in the South and 46 percent in districts where technology budgets are increasing.
Once again, regional differences surface with respect to perceived technology benefits. In general, school leaders in the South express stronger faith than their peers in other regions that technology is beneficial to their districts.
School leaders in nearly eight out of 10 districts (78 percent) also say they use data captured by technology to drive decision-making, including nearly nine out of 10 (89 percent) of large districts. Districts in the South (83 percent) are especially likely to use data-driven decision-making. Wealthy districts are somewhat less likely than poor districts to use data to make decisions -perhaps because they are under less pressure to improve test scores.
Half of school leaders (50 percent) cite lack of training as the most serious barrier to more effective data-driven decision-making. Lack of training is a particularly serious problem in the poorest school districts, according to 63 percent of school leaders in these districts, as well as in rural districts (55 percent) and low-tech districts (55 percent). More than half of school leaders in very poor districts (51 percent) also report that an absence of clear priorities has been a significant challenge. Thirty-nine percent of all school leaders also say a lack of understanding about what to do with the data is a key challenge.
More than a third of school leaders cite other barriers to data-driven decision-making, including incompatibility of computer systems (42 percent), lack of data collection priorities (36 percent) and/or lack of uniformity in data collections (35 percent). At least one in five school leaders also say outdated technology (31 percent), inaccurate or incomplete data (24 percent), timing issues (24 percent) and/or user interface problems (22 percent) prevent them from using data effectively.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|