Process Indicators

In the era of accountability, data-driven decision making (DDDM) is a new research area for authentic pedagogy through monitoring student progress and improving school accountability. It is based on input-and-result oriented indicators such as school demographics, facilities, budget, standardized test scores, dropout rates. But the indicators are unlikely to capture a dynamically interactive qualitative characteristics of school organizations featuring a loosely-coupled system and difficult to be measured or assessed.

School organizations and professional performance have many invisible and qualitative characteristics that cannot be fully understood and evaluated by input-and-output indicators based on objective observation, rational and logical analysis, and operational and quantified experiment. Young and Wayman and Springfield identified, in spite of the positive effect on agenda setting for using data, that schools tend to show distinctive response to use and approach indicators in terms of their organizational contexts and cultural norms. This means that school organizations can be understood by indicators for "multi-side description" of their total qualities such as values and meaning systems formed within organization, educational experiences and lifestyle, and the complicated contexts and processes of schooling. Scholars have referred to these indicators as process indicators.

Process indicators are usually related to the quality and realities of curriculum, instruction, and interaction. They may be useful for describing equal educational opportunity, for monitoring school reform practices such as change in curriculum, change in organizational structure, change in pedagogical practice, and for explaining and diagnosing causes and results of the educational systems. Also, the indicators can be really used for measuring and evaluating authentic student progress such as higherordered thinking, problem solving, student's happiness and satisfaction, prevention of unhealthy behaviors, and social capital. Thus, process indicators need to be complementary to input-and-outcome data for a valid and graphic description, monitoring and explanation of "why" and "how" the school outcomes occur.

In this paper the author will argue that process indicators produce authentic pedagogy, school effectiveness and accountability. This paper is to address what accountability indicators are likely to reveal the distinct contexts and qualitative characteristics of schools in order to stimulate and improve authentic pedagogy and accountability and how we capture better qualitative characteristic of teaching and learning, and to draw on schools' "what's-going-on". In the following sections the author will cover what DDDM and process indicator are, why process indicators are considered in the loose-coupling school, what are the relations between DDDM and process data in the era of accountability and then will draw on the implications and suggestions.