When Numerical Data Works

Last year, I had a Language Support Specialist who kept a tally mark of the verb tenses kids used when speaking. She also kept a column for complete and incomplete sentences. After a lesson, she asked me how many students I believed  were speaking with complete sentences at least seventy percent of the time. I figured it was twenty-six out of twenty-nine. The correct answer was twelve. The verb tenses used? Simple and progressive. This wasn't part of an evaluation. It wasn't designed to get me into trouble. It was simply descriptive feedback on what she saw. She didn't tell me how to analyze it. The numbers spoke for themselves. I needed to use more sentences stems, stress the importance of complete sentences and craft questions that would lead my ELL students toward more complex verb tenses. Sometimes I stress the danger of data. I point out that it's not about the numbers. I'm quick to talk about the fact that the biggest things are immeasurable. However, this was a case where the way it felt intuitively didn't match the reality of the language being spoken. It has me thinking about the role of quantitative data. I think it works best in the following cases:

• When it is used as a descriptive rather than evaluative indicator
• When it describes observable behaviors rather than cognitive processes
• When it is used in looking at skills rather than conceptual development 
• When it is used for objective rather than subjective feedback (though I'm not sure on this, because I have a hunch that surveys might work well in determining some of the more subjective aspects of teaching)
• When those closest to the source are involved in designing the metrics and analyzing the data