Tools for data-driven decision making in teacher education: Designing a portal to conduct field observation inquiry

Knowledge management (KM) and data-driven decision making (DDDM) are terms that are used with more frequency in teacher education. Although accreditation expectations and the increased focus on accountability have pushed these ideas to the forefront, the tools that support them are still not robust. Electronic portfolio assessment has been one approach that many schools of education adopt to address these gaps, but there has been little documentation on how electronic portfolios actually contribute to program-level assessment. This paper presents an application that provides an example of how data systems applied to existing practices can be used to support knowledge creation and DDDM in colleges of education. (Contains 4 figures and 4 tables.)