data

RECENT POSTS

The Upside and Dark Side of Collecting Student Data

February 11, 2013 | 11:38 AM | By
student-Internet-use

Matthew Williams

As learning increasingly moves toward the digital landscape, the role of data is also coming under more scrutiny. Every time a student browses the Internet or uses an app for learning, trace data is created, and thus the potential to use it for the benefit of that student.

A slew of companies and products offer the promise of collecting data to help educators, but there are still major concerns about how that data will be used, including issues around student privacy and teacher evaluations.

Reynol Junco, faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is studying the role of data in education, and says the potential for using learning analytics for students’ benefit is far from being realized. Using data as formative assessment — providing feedback to students in incremental steps rather than with big tests like mid-terms or finals — can be helpful to both students and teachers, he says.

“It’s collecting large amounts of data to identify patterns that will help tailor education more precisely for each child.”

“I think of learning analytics as the ultimate formative assessment. We’re always talking in education about how formative assessments are very important. It’s important to assess frequently and to make adjustments,” he said recently on NPR’s Tell Me More. “We’ve got data well before a student will flunk a first exam or a quiz and so we can make some predictions about the things that Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Teaching Strategies, data, digital footprint, learning analytics

Charter School Network Offers Its Own Data System to All Schools

September 11, 2012 | 12:00 PM | By
By Lillian Mongeau

As gathering data about student performance becomes a bigger priority in education, schools are faced with different choices on how to capture that data. A slew of tech companies offer a variety of products they’ve developed for schools, but some school districts are creating their own data systems.

California-based charter network Aspire Public Schools is one of them. The school created a data system called Schoolzilla, a web-based data platform that is now available to any school who wants to use it for free. Teachers or administrators can sign up at Schoolzilla to get started. Aspire offers implementation of the system for a fee. So far, there isn’t a set price for the service; it depends on the degree of help each school needs to set it up.

The data tool, originally developed three years ago, allows teachers to synthesize data from multiple sources and create reports. Teachers can see whether the entire class is struggling on a particular math standard, for example, or whether specific students are falling behind. The idea is to help teachers decide what tack to take with individual students.

“Teachers spent hours pulling data out of the attendance system, then the gradebook, then the tests, then matching it all together.”

But academic performance numbers aren’t the only data captured. Since the platform accesses multiple databases at once, teachers can compare things like student absenteeism to their grades. Or they can compare students’ grades to their scores on standardized tests in the same subject. Or they can compare the frequency of calls home with the number of disciplinary actions needed at school.

“Teachers spent hours pulling data out of the attendance system, then the gradebook, then the tests, then matching it all together in massive Excel spreadsheets,” said Anna Utgoff, Aspires’ Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Aspire, data, Rocketship, Schoolzilla, student data systems

Understanding Learning Analytics and Student Data

August 30, 2012 | 11:40 AM | By

There’s a lot to unpack about learning analytics — everything from how student data is captured to how it will be used. For all of its promises — and there are many, as evidenced below — the two biggest areas of concern regarding using student data are around issues of privacy, as in who has access to student information and what are the possible negative ways that information could be used, and how student data might be used against educators. Privacy is addressed in this otherwise mostly positive infographic, created by Australia’s informED, which takes a crack at explaining all the different aspects. What else would you add to it?

Learning Analytics: Leveraging Education Data – An infographic by the team at Open Colleges

 

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, data, learning analytics, student data systems

How Will Student Data Be Used?

July 3, 2012 | 8:00 AM | By

Over the next few months, a handful of states will take early steps to try to solve a problem that’s become a by-product of the digital age: navigating the flood of student data.

Right now, all sorts of student data are being kept in everything from testing programs and instructional software to grade books and learning management systems. But the data are often trapped in the program and not easily extracted or combined with other data on the same student, creating the educational equivalent of the Hotel California: data can check in any time it likes, but it can never leave. Or be used effectively by teachers.

So a new initiative, supported by state education leaders and funded by prominent foundations, plans to provide a place in the cloud for each state to store all data for every student, using “free” open source software. And, in the process, student achievement information will be connected to instructional apps and web resources. That is, as long as the effort can address concerns about technology, privacy, and whether enough education companies will want to build products for a system that could undermine parts of their own businesses.

In a nutshell, this describes the complicated Shared Learning Infrastructure, being built by the near-namesake Shared Learning Collaborative. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, data, Shared Learning Collaborative, Shared Learning Infrastructure, student data systems

What Does Your School Know About You?

January 27, 2012 | 11:02 AM | By

Flickr:SadieDiane

In the information age, data will follow us from the time we first walk into kindergarten to well past retirement. As data is used to guide us in making all kinds of decisions, from what we consume to what health plan we follow, it’s also becoming a powerful tool in education.

As more schools and colleges use algorithms to determine a student’s path, the Amazon- and Netflix-style practice of data mining will soon be the norm in how schools and students operate.

But that might not be such a bad thing. Just as the two online behemoths — Amazon and Netflix — are able to use software to predict books, music, and movies you might like based on your past preferences, schools are using data to place students not only in their appropriate learning level, but even to recommend what subject to major in.

“What we’ve seen in the consumer and healthcare world that’s made such a huge impact is what happens when you get data to the front lines.”

In K-12 education, it’s happening in classrooms and computer labs in both rich and blue-collar schools. In Covington Elementary, for example, the affluent Silicon Valley community where each fifth-grade student has a laptop and is learning math using Khan Academy videos and quizzes, teachers can track each student’s progress in real time on their iPads. When a student is stuck in one subject area, teachers can help the student one-on-one.

Likewise, at Rocketship’s Los Suenos Elementary school in a working class neighborhood in San Jose, teacher Alana Mednick can track her students’ progress based on how they score on their online computer games in their Learning Lab. And these examples are hardly rare these days.

On the college level, student data is being used for everything from recommending courses to picking majors. Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., rolled out a program last year Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Digital Tools, data, Higher Education

Standardizing Student Data: How to Make it Relevant

July 21, 2011 | 3:29 AM | By

Dave Dugdale

Schools have long dealt with data, tracking students’ personal information, grades, courses, attendance and the like. But for the most part, these records have been scattered across filing systems — electronic and otherwise. Although most states have implemented some sort of system by which to collect and monitor students’ data, these often remain disconnected. Many databases are not online, and when they are, data often isn’t transmissible because of different databases and file systems.

Efforts are underway to help standardize student data, and this week, two new developments occurred in this vein.

As EdWeek’s Sarah Sparks reports, the Common Education Data Standards Initiative released the first draft of the second stage of its core data definitions.

The initiative has been working on these standards for almost a year now, trying to devise standards so that a student’s school-related information can move with him. As it stands, even within districts, it’s been difficult to transfer students’ data throughout their academic career.  This new development makes it easier to track the data, whether it’s a matter of moving from grade school through high school or from high school to college, or moving from one school to another, in the same or different city or district.

It will be done by creating a common framework for the fields of information schools track. Some are obvious: name, address, city, zip. But they get increasingly complex: teacher base salary, student race/ethnicity, grade level (“junior” versus “grade 11″ for example), course name, Common Core Standard alignment, to name just a few examples. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, data, student data systems