From data through knowledge to action: Information management practices of school principals

How do elementary school principals manage the knowledge they consider relevant to improving student learning in their schools? The eight principals who were selected for this study were elementary principals who, in the superintendent's estimation, were making gains in their schools in the area of data usage for improving student achievement. Each principal was asked to select five to eight teachers from their staff who would be considered by them to be good to exemplary in performance. From each principal's list was selected two teachers. Each school was a composite school with grades from JK to Grade 8. School size ranged from 225 students to 575 students. The board in this study is a mid size south western Ontario urban Catholic district school board. Total student population is 21,000 students with 14,000 students being elementary age.;From the results of the study it can be seen that these principals did not employ a consistent, coherent and systematic knowledge management strategy for handling data/information in their schools about student learning. Principals' espoused theories of action did not match with their actual theories in use when they described their actions about knowledge identification, capture and usage. Uninformed teacher autonomy combined with a weakly applied performance appraisal system had produced a situation where principals had adopted a hands-off approach to improving student learning. Parents and students were kept at arms length from any form of dialogue, critique and/or decision-making regarding improved student learning. Indeed, groups and/or individuals were not encouraged to become a part of a learning process but rather were kept outside of any assessment of and for learning improvement.;Two types of data were collected for the study in the spring of 2004. The first was interview data with all principals and teachers. Interview questions aligned with the questions in the second form of data collection---the survey. Each interview consisted of twenty-six questions designed to have participants elaborate upon the items in the survey about information management in their school. The interview and survey are situated within the conceptual framework in the section entitled model frameworks---methods and strategies.