4 Easy Ways to Check Your District’s Student Data

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXzciM2G3O4

Presented by Rebecca Coleman – Transcription Below

Introduction

Hi, welcome to the Illuminate Whiteboard Series. My name is Rebecca Coleman, and I am a customer success manager on the Illuminate Education Student Information System, which is kind of a mouthful. Today I’m gonna talk to you a little bit about four ways to check your student data. Your student data can be a really important feature to know about because it can relate to getting additional funding. So being able to make sure your data is clean for grants, for programs that federal or state governments may be answering, or even organizations like The Gates Foundation.

Looking at Data Sets

So, we’re gonna take a look at some important data sets, so the things that you need to make sure are crucial as you’re going through your data. One would test scores, graduation rates, the CTE rates, how are your students doing completing their career technical education pathways and are you reporting that information correctly, attendance rates, promotion rates. College and career readiness indicators have become really big in the last year. And so making sure that all of the information that you can be claiming there is visible. And status of your special populations. All of those data sources kind of merge in together into one place. And there’s lots of things that can go wrong.

Four Easy Ways to Check

And so we’re gonna look at four easy ways to check that. First, plan an idea of how you want to look at it with the end goal in mind. So, if you’re looking in your data system and you want to know how your test scores are going for a specific grade level, start with that as your idea. Then have some systems in place for entering that data into whatever system you are. Who’s gonna be responsible for making sure that test scores get downloaded from the state or added from the ACT Board or any of those other locations? And are they gonna have continuous growth support on those systems?

Don’t Throw Data In the Wild

So making sure that you’re not just throwing the data out into the wild and hoping that somebody is gonna know how to use it. And then lastly, talk about the data. So with the stakeholders in mind, bring all your counselors together to look…about test scores, graduation rates, CTE. Talk about your CC&I. Look at all of that data and have conversations about how are we servicing their students. “Are our special population kids keeping up with our general population kids? Do we have all of the scores in for AP or SAT or ACT or PSAT?” And if not, where are those holes?

Who’s Using the Data Sets?

The people that use that data the most are absolutely going to be the ones that are gonna be the best about checking the data. Once you have that data compiled, then go and look, are there grants, federal programs, state programs to either help increase the number of graduates that you have or help increase your test scores. Or if you’re doing really well, look at that…what can we do to extend it further?

Conclusion

Keeping in mind that all of those datasets are available in your student systems and keeping in mind that continuous growth and support is probably one of the most important things you can do to support your people. These are just some really simple, easy tips to keep in mind of how we can check our student data. Thank you so much for joining us on this short whiteboard series, and we’ll see you soon.

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Illuminate Education is a provider of educational technology and services offering innovative data, assessment and student information solutions. Serving K-12 schools, our cloud-based software and services currently assist more than 1,600 school districts in promoting student achievement and success.

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