D179 Data-Informed Practices is catalog number EDUC 5061 and is worth 3 competency units. It builds data literacy for teachers: the types of data available, what each one can and cannot support, and how to locate, collect and analyse them so that a teaching decision follows. D179 and EDUC 5061 name the same course. The skill it is really developing is restraint, because the difference between a data-informed teacher and a data-decorated one is knowing what a number does not say.
The question is always what do I do Monday
This course sits inside the curriculum and instruction programme, which sets its altitude. The unit of decision is a class, a small group or a student, and the output of any analysis is an instructional move. That is a different job from a school leader working out where a building's problem lives, and answers written at the wrong altitude lose aspects even when the analysis is competent.
The data a teacher actually has divides into four families. Screening and benchmark data, collected a few times a year, tells you who might need something different. Diagnostic data tells you what specifically a student can and cannot do. Formative evidence gathered inside a lesson tells you whether to move on this afternoon. Summative data tells you what was learned at the end of a unit, too late to change that unit but in time to change the next one. Each family answers one question and gets misused when it is asked another. A benchmark score cannot tell you which skill to reteach, and an exit ticket cannot tell you whether a student needs a formal evaluation.
The second thing the course is watching is whether you understand what a score is made of. A number produced by an assessment reflects the items on that assessment, the conditions on that day, and the student's actual understanding, in some proportion you cannot see. Treating one number as a verdict on a child is exactly the habit this course exists to interrupt.
Triangulation is the habit that fixes most of this. Any conclusion worth acting on should be visible in at least two independent kinds of evidence: a quiz result and a piece of classwork, an observation and an exit ticket, a score and something a student said while working. When two sources agree you have a finding. When they disagree you have something more interesting than a finding, because the disagreement usually points at the thing your assessment was not measuring.
Work here closes as Competent or Not Competent, with no letter grade and no ordinary grade point average involved. The 3 competency units describe the share of a six month flat rate term the course occupies.
Turning aspects into an analysis plan
Scoring detail sits in your Course of Study rather than the public catalog, so count the aspects on your rubric before drafting. Each is judged separately and each has to reach a 2 for the task to pass. The aspect most often left thin in this course is the one asking what you would do next, because students spend their effort on the analysis and treat the instructional response as an afterthought.
The budget, worked. Assume five scored aspects and directions pointing near 2,000 words. Reserve 130 words to describe the class and the assessment and 110 to close, leaving 1,760 of scored body. Flat, that is 352 each. Weight it: 480 to the interpretation aspect, 440 to the instructional response aspect, and 280 to each of the remaining three. That totals 1,760.
Make your tables first. A data deliverable is built around its exhibits, and prose drafted before the table almost always describes a pattern that the table turns out not to show.
A shape for a classroom data deliverable
Where your directions specify a format, follow theirs. Where they do not, this sequence keeps every scored move findable.
| Section | What it contains | Common thin spot |
|---|---|---|
| Class picture | Grade, subject, size, and the relevant characteristics of the group | Written so generically it could be any class |
| Assessment described | What the instrument measured, how many items, under what conditions | The instrument named but never characterised |
| Results displayed | A table or chart with counts, not just percentages | Percentages of a class of nineteen, with no counts shown |
| Disaggregation | The same results broken out by skill, by item type or by group | Whole class averages only, which hide everything |
| Interpretation | What the pattern suggests about understanding, and what it cannot settle | Restating the numbers in sentences |
| Instructional response | What changes tomorrow, for whom, and for how long | Reteach the unit, with no specificity |
| Next evidence | What you will look at to know whether the response worked | Missing entirely |
Disaggregation by item or skill is where classroom data becomes useful. A class average of sixty-eight percent is a fact with no action in it. The same data showing that nineteen of twenty-two students missed both items requiring a two-step inference, while everyone handled single-step recall, is a lesson plan.
From a pattern to a move that is actually different
The weakest instructional responses in this course are not wrong; they are unspecific. Reteach, provide additional practice and differentiate instruction all describe categories of action rather than actions. An aspect asking what you would do next is asking for something a substitute could carry out from your description.
Three questions force the necessary specificity. What exactly will be different about the instruction, in method rather than in quantity? More of the same practice rarely fixes a misconception, so name the representation, model or sequence you will change. Who receives it, by name of group rather than as struggling students, and how did the data define that group? And when does it happen, in what part of which lesson, since a response with no place in the schedule is a response that will not occur.
Grouping deserves the same care. Data-informed grouping means a group exists because of a specific shared gap and dissolves when that gap closes, which is a different thing from a permanent set of tables labelled by ability. If your deliverable proposes groups, say what defined membership, what the group will work on that the rest of the class will not, and what result would end the group. Groups with no exit condition become tracking by accident, and an evaluator reading an equity-minded rubric notices.
The strongest submissions also say what they will not do. Choosing not to reteach a skill that only three students missed, and instead handling it in a small group while the class moves on, is a defensible instructional decision and shows the judgment the course is building. A plan that responds to every gap equally has not prioritised anything.
Data handling and sourcing for a teacher
- De-identify every student. Use student A or a pseudonym, and never include a name, an identification number or an image of student work with a name on it.
- Show counts alongside percentages. In a class of twenty-something, percentages exaggerate and counts tell the truth.
- Describe the assessment honestly, including its limits. A ten item quiz supports a smaller claim than a full diagnostic and saying so is a strength.
- Cite the research behind any strategy you propose, using peer reviewed work rather than a lesson sharing site.
- Keep to the citation style your directions name, and cite at the point of claim including inside table captions.
What separates Competent from a return
Each aspect scores on its own, so these deliverables return for narrow reasons. The three that recur are interpretation that only restates the numbers, an instructional response too vague to act on, and no plan for checking whether the response worked.
- Every claim about student understanding points at a specific row, item or group in an exhibit.
- The interpretation names at least one thing the data cannot settle.
- The instructional response is specific enough that someone else could deliver it.
- A follow-up measure and a date are both named.
- Nothing identifiable about any student appears anywhere in the document.
Performance assessment work at WGU can be revised and resubmitted with no grade penalty, so a return costs calendar rather than standing. Since the term is six months at a flat rate, calendar is the resource worth protecting, and the follow-up measure is a two-sentence addition that prevents a whole resubmission. Where your plan pairs this course with a proctored objective assessment, our boundary does not move: preparation only, never sitting or assisting during an assessment, and no request for portal credentials.
Data in front of you and no move to make?
Send the D179 rubric and your de-identified results. You get a disaggregation plan, an interpretation that separates evidence from inference, and a response specific enough to teach from.
Five mistakes that stall D179
- Reporting the average and stopping. The class average is the one number guaranteed to describe nobody in the room.
- Using percentages with tiny denominators. One student in a class of twenty is five percent, and a chart of five percent movements reads as noise dressed as findings.
- Diagnosing from a screener. Screening data identifies who to look at more closely. It does not identify what to teach.
- Writing a response with no method change. More practice on the same representation usually reproduces the same misconception.
- Skipping the follow-up. An instructional decision with no check attached cannot show whether anything improved, and the aspect asking about monitoring will find nothing.
Three questions students send about D179
Is D179 the same course as EDUC 5061?
Can I use my own classroom data?
What if I do not currently teach?
Where D179 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 1 current WGU program. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.