Specificity of Information in Data-based Decision Making in Schools

The term “specificity of information” refers to the unit of information and its degree of divisability or decomposability. Thus, the most specific piece of data would be an individual’s response to a single question. Less specific information would be yielded by summarizations (such as counts, averages and totals) across persons or across questions. Using the literature and theory from the psychology of human decisionmaking, this paper examines the role of specificity of information in school-based decisionmaking. It presents a simple heuristic model that considers information utility as a function of the technical quality of the information, characteristics of the decisionmaker(s), and environmental circumstances. Examples from existing practice are used to illustrate the contexts (social, political and organizational circumstances) in which data-based decisions are actually, and might ideally, be made.