How can school leaders in low-resource settings effectively gather student data to improve learning outcomes?

Learners, especially those from vulnerable backgrounds, benefit from a school environment that is supportive and responsive to their individual learner needs. Fostering teaching methods that are both inclusive and adaptive to individual student needs has the potential to improve the effectiveness of instruction as teachers strive to mitigate learning gaps, and school leaders are critical to this effort.

Emerging evidence suggests that providing school leaders with even basic data on student learning outcomes can lead to improvements in school quality and inform new approaches to instruction. However, with COVID-related school closures, hybrid programs, and various reopening stages, school leaders face challenges in collecting high-quality data on student learning and a lack of support to turn insights into effective practices.  

To that end, Global School Leaders seek solutions that will support school leaders from disadvantaged contexts to cost-effectively gather meaningful student data and use it to improve outcomes for learners.  Solutions to this Challenge should:

• Ensure that data collected is complementary to school data already being tracked by governments, with minimal overlap and disruption to current government collection processes.

• Provide school leaders with a comprehensive plan for identifying key stakeholders responsible for a child’s learning, determining the student achievement data they need, and facilitating the transfer of data to each group.

• Enable real-time tracking of student learning outcomes based on data-driven interventions.

• Create a repository of best practices and impact data that can inform educational policy decision-making at local and regional levels.

About Global School Leaders

Global School Leaders is an international non-profit organization focused on mobilizing key stakeholders to invest and participate in school leadership training. We work with funders, governments, and NGOs in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) to strengthen their education systems. We currently work with partners in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Philippines, Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria. Cumulatively, we have trained over 4,000 school leaders and impacted the lives of over 910,000 learners.