Data-Driven Instruction: 4 Techniques for Personalized Teaching

The students in any given classroom represent a range of learning needs—and students learn best when instruction is tailored to those needs. But while teachers know the one-size-fits-all approach often leaves students behind, time constraints can make meaningful personalization a challenge. 

However, with the help of technology, teachers can now gather deeper insights into students’ needs to help them efficiently and effectively personalize instruction. This data-driven instruction empowers teachers to transform classrooms into dynamic environments where every learner can thrive. 

This article explores 4 data-driven instruction strategies: unit pretests, digital quizzes, assessment choice boards, and grammar mini-lessons. 

Key Takeaways

• With data driven instruction, students at all levels can make meaningful progress.
•  4 options for data driven instruction include unit pretests, digital quizzes, choice boards, and grammar mini-lessons.
• Data driven instruction improves achievement by addressing knowledge gaps and leveling content appropriately. 

What Is Data-Driven Instruction?

Data-driven instruction is the process of tailoring instructional content to the learning levels or learning preferences of your students. The process involves 3 main steps:

• Assessment: Gather data about your students’ knowledge, skills, or learning preferences through pretests, schoolwide diagnostic assessments, or informal observations.
• Analysis: Analyze the data to determine what needs or learning gaps you need to address.
• Action: Personalize units, daily lessons, and assessments to address the needs you’ve identified.

By ensuring course content aligns with students’ prior knowledge and is personalized to their needs, data-driven instruction leads to improved engagement—and better outcomes.

4 Ways To Use Data-Driven Instruction for Personalized Teaching

The following techniques are just a few ways teachers can use data about their students to provide personalized teaching.  

Unit pretests 

One data-driven strategy begins with pretesting students’ readiness for each unit. A pretest is a diagnostic assessment that introduces the skills and content students will need to master in order to achieve the unit’s objectives. Students’ performance serves as a benchmark to help inform your choices about what content to cover and how to teach it.

For example, before teaching students how to write literary analysis essays, an English Language Arts (ELA) teacher could pretest students on literary devices and essay-writing techniques. If most of the class is unfamiliar with metaphor and imagery, the teacher incorporates those topics into the unit. If a handful of students missed questions on essay-writing basics, the teacher would plan small-group workshops or individualized lessons. 

This strategy improves student achievement because it helps you cover the skills and content students need most. Without diagnostic pretest data, students missing prerequisite skills might be left behind. Conversely, if students have already mastered the skills, you can avoid them becoming disengaged or bored.

How to use pretests to drive unit planning:

1. First, decide what skills and content your students need to succeed with the unit. These should be the same criteria you’ll measure on the unit’s summative assessment.

Tip: Write the summative assessment and the scoring guide or rubric before you create the pretest.

1. Create a pretest that covers these skills and content. With TAO, you can create a pretest from a robust question bank on virtually any subject.  
2. Give the test to your students, and explain the purpose—to gather data to help you plan the upcoming unit.  
3.  Analyze the results to determine your students’ needs. Look for patterns that impact most of the class and outliers that affect individual students. A platform like TAO provides analytics to help you quickly discover skills gaps that apply to your whole class or individual learners.
4. When planning your unit, incorporate any skills or content that most or all of your students still need to learn. For any individual learners who are missing essential skills, plan individualized assignments, 1:1 tutoring, or similar interventions. 

Digital quizzes

While a unit is in progress, teachers can also use more informal digital quizzes to conduct formative assessment and collect data about student learning over time. A digital quiz consists of a few questions—delivered via a testing platform or learning management system—to target the learning objectives from a portion of a unit. The data from these formative assessments helps teachers make short-term adjustments to teaching techniques and lesson content. 

For example, a high school Physics teacher covering a unit on Newtonian mechanics could quiz students at regular intervals during the unit, such as after students learn about Newton’s First Law, Second Law, and Third Law. The digital format would provide the teacher with immediate results so that teaching adjustments can be implemented as soon as the next class period.

If most students struggle with a quiz on the First Law, the teacher would explain the concept in a different way or through a new medium (e.g., a video rather than a print source) before moving onto instruction about the Second Law. 

One benefit of formative quizzes is the immediate impact on teaching efficacy. For example, TAO grades quizzes instantly, which creates more time for teachers to consider how the most recent teaching strategies affected learning and what techniques might work better during the next few class periods.

Another benefit on assessment platforms like TAO is the variety of question types, particularly portable-custom interactions that require students to do complex, interactive tasks that provide rich data about student understanding. 

How to use digital quizzes to make ongoing teaching adjustments 

1. First, review your long-term unit plan and choose when you’ll administer quizzes. Look for points in the unit when your students must demonstrate proficiency with the current objectives in order to succeed with the next objectives in the unit.   
2. For each quiz, create or choose a few questions that focus on short-term learning objectives.
3. Compare the results for each question with your teaching strategies. For example, if nearly everyone missed Question 2, consider what was happening during the class period when you covered that objective. What strategies did you use? How did they impact learning, and what could you do differently when you re-teach the concept? 

Assessment choice boards

Data about your students’ interests and preferences can also help you offer robust choices for assessing skills and knowledge. An assessment choice board is a visual display of several options for demonstrating knowledge at the end of a unit. The teacher designs choices based on informal observations or formal polling of students’ interests or learning preferences.

For example, in a Grade 3 lesson on weather vocabulary, you could offer students different ways to show what they learned—for example, by creating vocabulary cards, writing a story or poem, or writing a paragraph. 

Choice boards improve academic achievement because they allow students to engage more deeply in summative assessments. When students can choose how they demonstrate learning, they’re more invested in the final product. 

How to use learning preference data to design choice boards

1. First, collect data about your students’ interests and learning preferences. Some teachers give surveys on the first day of class. You can also collect this data through ongoing informal observations.
2. Decide which learning objectives your students should demonstrate in the final product—regardless of the project choice.
3. Choose 3-6 ways that students can demonstrate knowledge. Each way could align with a different learning preference—such as kinesthetic, visual, auditory, or reading/writing. All choices should allow students to demonstrate the same learning objectives, but each task will also have its own requirements specific to each final product. For example, if one choice is performing a skit, you might have requirements for length. 
4. Display the choices and requirements in the classroom or on a class website. 

Grammar mini-lessons

You can also use data from student writing samples to create mini-lessons on the grammar skills your students need most. These 10-minute mini-lessons focus on a pattern of error—such as multiple run-on sentences—that you observe across multiple students’ writing.

Let’s say a teacher for Advanced Placement (AP) European History observed a pattern of apostrophe errors while grading practice essays. If multiple students repeatedly forgot or misplaced apostrophes, the teacher could spend 10 minutes during class reviewing apostrophe rules and sharing models of correct apostrophe usage.

Grammar mini-lessons improve writing achievement by breaking grammar concepts into manageable chunks that are easier to commit to long-term memory. 

How to use student writing to drive grammar mini-lessons

1. First, while grading, look for errors that repeat across multiple students. One method is to manually tally the errors you observe. If you use TAO to score writing, our analytics can show you the most prevalent error patterns.
2. Next, create a 10-minute lesson targeting a single grammar skill that recurs in your students’ writing. Examples include subject-verb agreement errors, incorrect verb tenses, and fragments. 

Tip: If commas are a concern, focus each mini-lesson on a single comma rule (rather than all the comma rules) to prevent cognitive overload.

1. Deliver the mini-lesson to your students. To check for understanding, your lesson might include a quick performance task—such as correcting errors in the graded drafts. A single class period should include no more than 1 mini-lesson.
2. When grading the next writing assessment, check for progress, and deliver targeted feedback as needed. 

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By implementing these 4 data driven instruction strategies—unit pretests, digital quizzes, assessment choice boards, and grammar mini-lessons—you can personalize your teaching to your students’ needs, to ensure that all learners remain engaged and can make meaningful progress.

For more information about data-driven instruction, please see Connecting the Dots Between Learning & Assessment Through Test Item Metadata, Reimagining Education Through Data Analytics in Assessment, and more articles in the TAO blog. 

FAQs

What are some examples of data-driven instruction?

Examples of data-driven instruction include planning units based on diagnostic assessment data, making ongoing teaching adjustments based on quiz data, offering student-centered choices for summative assessments, and creating mini-lessons to target skills gaps.