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Abstract
The purpose of the study was to determine the effectiveness of the StART training to assist administrators and teachers in 18 elementary, middle, and high schools in accessing instructional achievement data regarding current students, accessing historical data about groups of students and individual students, linking information from a variety of data reports, and drawing accurate conclusions regarding the data to guide instructional decisions. The study was conducted across schools in the K-12 continuum of public education. The Student Assessment Reporting Tool (StART) is a web-based application that has been designed to allow teachers, administrators, and other education personnel to view the performance of students on previous assessments based on the current enrolled student population, as well as historical information on previous groups of students. The training was based on a model in which the researcher trained a leadership team (5-20 people) within the school that then redelivered the training to the other personnel within the building. The training was approximately one and one-half hours at each school location and provided those in the training with hands-on experience using the StART program, as well as instruction on assessment score interpretation, appropriate uses for data, and data analysis methods. The sample consisted of 175 participants who were either teachers, administrators or other certified personnel in 18 schools in which teacher level access to StART was piloted. The independent variables were level of education, role in the school, years of experience, school level, Title I school status and leadership tenure. The dependent variables included three sub scores and a total score obtained from the StART pilot school survey. The results showed that participants who were trained by the researcher had statistically significantly higher scores in all 4 scores. In addition, those who were in high schools had a statistically significant score for Accessing StART. Those who had a specialist degree had statistically significant differences for Accessing StART and in the Total Score. Index words: Data-driven, Assessment, Technology, Professional Development, Leadership, Disaggregated, Accountability, Staff Development, Evaluation, Teaching, Education, No Child Left Behind, Adequate Yearly Progress, Web-based