School-University Partnership for Evidence-Driven School Improvement in Estonia

Abstract

It has been acknowledged that evidence-driven practices may lead schools to improved instructional practices, student learning, or organizational improvement; still the evidence is underused by the teachers or school leaders. This study focuses on analyzing how to strengthen the evidence-driven school improvement in school-university partnership programs. Five schools learnt over a period of one school year in collaboration with the university coaches how to collect evidence in classroom and organizational level for improvement process. The results of our study illustrate profiles of the schools based on the usage of data-informed evidence, research-based evidence, or both to make decisions in the instructional and organizational level. Enablers and barriers of data use from the perspective of organizational, user, and data characteristics to implement evidence-driven practices are discussed.