ICT Research and School Performance Feedback: A Perfect Marriage?

An important step towards the successful integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in schools is to facilitate their capacity to develop a school based ICT policy. However, one of the biggest challenges for schools is to gather data that could help shape such policy development. In this context, ICT researchers can be very useful as they can use the data gathered from their research projects to give feedback to schools. In this article, we present an electronic school performance feedback system (e-SPFS) we developed for schools that participated in our survey research. This e-SPFS illustrates how researchers can collaborate with practitioners; and how schools use data to examine their performance, their strengths and their weaknesses in shaping ICT policy decisions and practice. We appeal the ICT research community to carry out more research that is grounded in a school performance feedback cycle. (Contains 1 figure.)