British Educational Research Journal

In recent decades, the belief has originated that data use contributes to more thought‐out decisions in schools. The literature has suggested that fruitful data use is often the result of interactions among team members. However, up until now, most of the available research on data use has used ‘collaboration’ as an umbrella concept to describe very different types of interaction, without specifying the nature of collaboration or the degree of interdependency that takes place in interactions. Therefore, the current study investigates and describes Flemish teachers’ individual, co‐operative and collaborative data use. In doing so, the level of interdependency of teachers’ interactive activities (storytelling, helping, sharing, joint work) is taken into account. The results of a qualitative study with semi‐structured interviews show that teachers’ data use is predominantly of an individual nature and that felt interdependencies among teachers are few. The study enhances knowledge and opens the conceptual debate about teachers’ interactions in the context of data use.