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Evaluation in the Wild: A Distributed Cognition Perspective on Teacher Assessment

Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Matthew A. Clifford

Wisconsin Center for Educational Research

Purpose: The authors adapted distributed cognition theory to provide a detailed account of how schoolleaders use knowledge of the new programs, existing initiatives, andschool contexts to guide policy implementation.

Research Design: The study used distributed cognition theory to show how policy implementation studies provide an occasion to understand the influence of context on practice. The article focuses on a case study of (a) a suburban district design of a teacher evaluation policy and (b) a principal’s effort to use the evaluation program with the teachers in her middleschool.The authors adaptedthe distributedcognitiontheory to provide ananalytic framework to better address the issues of school leadership.

Findings: The authors found that the design of the policy required teacher evaluators to address the tensions between summative and formative evaluation implicit in the program design. In this case, the principal relied heavily on her discretion to determine which features of the teacher evaluationpolicywouldbe emphasizedwith different teachers. The case also providedinsightinto how the principalreconciledthe demandsof evaluation with ongoing instructional and personnel demands.

Conclusions: The distributed cognition framework provided a valuable tool for organizing close studies of the cognitive and contextual dimensions of leadership practice and can provide valuable information about how policies can be designed and used to shape real changes in everyday practice.

Key Words: distributed cognition • instructional leadership • policy design and implementation • teacher evaluation • case study • empirical paper

Educational Administration Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4, 578-619 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0013161X05285986


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