One day my car broke down. It wouldn’t start no matter what I did. Luckily, I had it at my house. It so happened that a friend of mine came by and asked if he could take a look at it.
"Sure" I said.
After walking around it a few times, he said "Have you checked the air in the tires?"
On another occasion someone very close to me (I won’t tell you it was my wife as I want her to remain
anonymous
otherwise she would be embarrassed by this story) was driving her car when she noticed that it began dramatically to pull to the right. Wisely my wife, I mean this person, pulled into a gas station and got the attention of an attendant.
"Do you have someone here who does alignments? I think my car needs a front end alignment."
"You don’t need an alignment lady" he replied, "you need a new tire. Your passenger side front tire is completely
flat!"
WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
Finally, one time your instructor, I mean someone
he knows, was told that the car that person was driving was overheating. That same person was told to put some antifreeze into the car, although I swear he told me to put it in the battery. It was not my fault, err
ahh, the person’s fault. Anyway it really doesn’t matter whose fault it was now does it?
IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME NOW, CAN'T YOU
JUST FORGET ABOUT IT!?
Sorry, excuse me. Well, the antifreeze was put in the battery and, well, the car didn’t overheat anymore! You have to give me that. At least it didn’t overheat again until the owner bought a new battery.
These examples illustrate how people can be confused by or draw the wrong conclusions about information they have received. If your car is not running, the most perfectly inflated tires in the world won’t matter. If you have a completely flat tire, no alignment will make your car go straight. If you put antifreeze in your battery, you will only correct you overheating problem until you get a new battery to replace the one you destroyed.
Much less obviously, teachers can be confused by their data. Data can be so scattered it is difficult to interpret a trend. Sometimes a teacher cannot determine whether a student is progressing toward an objective.
At other times the data is clearly indicates that an intervention with a student is not working. In these situations teachers need to ask questions about their intervention and use the data they have been collecting to help them to answer the questions.
Once you have a data based objective, are taking the right kind of data, and are presenting it in a graphical format, you are in the perfect position to evaluate that data. The pages in this section will provide some strategies for evaluating data.
