Kaffenberger and Davis (2009, as cited in Drummond &
Jones, 2012) noted that “unless school
counselors know why collecting data
is important, and how to gather and
make sense of the data, school counselors and the schools they serve will
continue to flounder with how to influence students’ educational success most
effectively” (p. 109). I think that I
have a pretty clear understanding about why
collecting data is important, but I am not as confident in the area of making
sense of the data. What I mean is that I
know how to plug data into spreadsheets, but creating graphs to make sense of
the data is still a bit foreign to me because I just haven’t had a ton of
practice with it. My concern is that
unless I receive more extensive training in using a data collection program, I
may end up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make it do what I
want it to do, and time is a precious commodity that counselors never seem to
get enough of. I can understand the
hesitation on the part of many counselors who feel inept when it comes to
keeping and utilizing data, because most of us haven’t had adequate training in
these systems and feel inept at using them.
To be honest, the last computer skills class I had was during my
freshman year of college, and it pretty much covered your basic computer
functions in Microsoft Word and Excel.
Perhaps making sense of the data is not the monster I am making it out
to be, but I find that it is easy to fear what we do not know.
Along
the lines of making sense of data, I found Drummond and Jones’ discussion of
disaggregate data to be particularly enlightening. According to Drummond and Jones (2012),
disaggregating data is the most important
step in analyzing data, and involves breaking down the data according to
specific demographics of interest in order to present patterns, themes and
trends. However, Drummond and Jones
caution, it is not possible to discover all demographic variables through the
use of typical surveys or needs assessments, as some demographic variables are hidden. As counselors, we may need to create informal
ways to assess the needs of hidden demographic groups, such as students who
identify as LGBTQ. The discussion about
hidden demographic groups was certainly eye-opening for me, and I plan to tuck
this information away in my mind as I think about collecting data as a school
counselor in the future.
References
Dollarhide, C.T., & Saginak, K. A. (2012). Comprehensive school counseling programs:
K-12 delivery systems in action.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
No comments:
Post a Comment