by PRP Group, on 07/17/2023
Florence 1 Schools is a mixed suburban and rural district. We have a 70% poverty rate, and all of our schools receive Title I funding. We face many of the challenges that high-poverty districts around the country face, and some of those challenges are compounded by the fact that schools in South Carolina are poorly funded and supported, with language in our state constitution affording students a “minimally adequate” education.
Like many schools, we believe in using data to inform instruction. Recently, we began using a new kind of data—cognitive data—that has helped change our approach to data-informed instruction more generally. Here’s how it’s working.
Moving from ‘data-rich” to ‘data literate’
Like many school districts across the country, even when our district was data-rich, we did not feel we were using a synthesis of all data sources to make the best decisions about instruction, curriculum and professional development. We also recognized that there were additional sources of data about the learner that were not traditionally considered in the decision-making process.