Data and learning that affords program improvement: a response to the U.S. accountability movement in teacher education

The current U.S. education agenda places unprecedented attention on improving the quality of its roughly fifteen hundred teacher preparation programs. The effort places considerable weight on measuring program effectiveness and includes a push to hold programs accountable for their graduates’ effects on student performance. Concerns regarding the use of value-added methodologies for this purpose, combined with unsatisfactory measures historically in use (e.g., multiple-choice tests of teaching knowledge, surveys of program graduates), have led many states to adopt the use of a teaching performance measure (see, e.g., www.​pacttpa.​org and www.​edtpa.​aacte.​org). States and programs have allocated significant resources to the use of multiple metrics in the quest for program accountability, but far less effort has been paid to the use of such metrics for program improvement. Given the rather limited research on how programs use these data to improve (see e.g., Peck and McDonald in New Educ 9(1):12–28, 2013), the following offers a case analysis of faculty learning as a function of data use for program improvement. In particular, the case presents an analysis of the types of data that mediated faculty learning within a program, and the organizational conditions that facilitated learning and program renewal.