Next Generation of Information Technology in Educational Management - 10th IFIP WG 3.7 Conference, ITEM 2012, Bremen, Germany, August 5-8, 2012, Revised Selected Papers

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the 10th IFIP WG 3.7 Conference on Information Technology in Educational Management, ITEM 2012, held in Bremen, Germany, in August 2012. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers offer an outstanding overview of the contemporary field of information technology in educational management. They focus on four key questions: Why do we need new educational management information systems? What issues face those developing new educational management information systems? What new educational management information systems are being developed? What educational management systems are already in place?

What`s the root cause?

Identify a problem or issue
Students with different learning potentials tend to underperform in the Humanities studies in the school-leaving exam

Focusing questions
What are the results in Polish in the school-leaving exam?

Clarifying questions
Which specific skills are causing the most

Discovery phase -problem identification Preparation
How do we organize for data use?

Discovery
What is the problem?

Diagnosis
What is the root cause?
Comenius Multilateral Project 510477-2010-LLP-PL: DATAUSE -Using Data for Improving School and Student Performance Page 32

Clarifying questions
Which specific skills are causing the most difficulty?

Final definition of a problem
Students experience problems with both: long and short forms of writing in Polish. cause?

Doing
What are we going to do about it?

Evaluation
What results did we get?

Diagnosis phase -root cause definition
Problem: Why?
Because… Students tend to avoid any short or long forms of writing and thus, give one or two-sentenced replies to open-ended Students experience problems with both: long and short forms of writing in Polish.

Preparation
How do we organize for data use?

Discovery
What is the problem?

Diagnosis
What is the root cause? thus, give one or two-sentenced replies to open-ended questions.

Why? Because…
Students do not feel motivated to use short or long forms of writing.

Why? Because…
Teachers administer school tests which are mainly based on closeended questions. cause?

Doing
What are we going to do about it?

Evaluation
What results did we get?
• In Science -to include more open-ended questions in school Science tests and give marks for the correct use of Polish • In Languages -to engage students into translation activities and give marks for the correct use of Polish • In Polish -to provide other teachers with a set of guidelines for checking Polish grammar, punctuation and lexical items

Action Plan
The testing phase takes one month and then all the departments report to the PLC on the implementation of the Action Plan. cause?

Doing
What are we going to do about it?

Evaluation
What results did we get?

Evaluation against the improvement targets Preparation
How do we organize for data use?

Discovery
What is the problem?

Diagnosis
What is the root cause?

Problem definition Improvement target
Students have difficulty with both: long and short forms of writing in Polish The increase of the EVA indicator in the essay writing skills area from 0.34 to 0.5 starting from the examination session 2013.

Evaluation
What results did we get?

Root cause of the problem (student ) Improvement target
Students do not feel motivated to use short or long forms of writing.
Students feel motivated to use short or long forms of writing due to the new marking system.

Root cause of the problem (teaching practice ) Improvement target
Teachers' tendency to administer tests with close-ended questions only.

25% of each test in any subject includes open-ended questions. Marking of all tests
includes also linguistic correctness.

Dissemination -Sharing lessons learnt
Fears and challenges "Data Use" feels too abstract The inquiry process takes a significant amount of extra time

Conditions for success
Convincing school leadership to take part in the process Ensuring appropriate staffing of the data team There may be resistance from the faculty due to additional responsibilities "It is a lot of paper work" the data team Appointing a leader for the data team Involving the whole faculty in the process

Project Interim Evaluation
"We have bigger interest in data, we look at it more carefully" The course gave us the impetus to investigate different subjects of our school" "We explore more deeply how we teach" Comenius Multilateral Project 510477-2010-LLP-PL: DATAUSE -Using Data for Improving School and Student Performance Page 37 "We explore more deeply how we teach" "Thanks to the program, we standardized the process of approaching problems and tackling them" "We will continue working according to the Data Use course methodology in the future"