BI Tool: The CAR Report – Cumulative Assessment Record

Last month, the Shiawassee Regional Education Service District shared their beautiful Student Growth Percentile Scatterplots with the BI Tool Community. The report elegantly visualizes the relationship between a students’ scale scores and their growth percentiles. If you missed it, check it out here! 

Shiawassee uses Illuminate’s custom reporting tool to feed data into their BI Tool reports. No SQL required! This month, however, we’re going to highlight Brittany’s work at Salt Lake City Schools in Utah. When she started working with the BI Tool, Brittany chose to learn SQL, giving her even greater power and flexibility with Illuminate’s BI Tool. Read on to learn all about the “Cumulative Assessment Record” she created for special education teachers and principals.

Our goal at Illuminate is to foster a robust BI Tool Community where Illuminate BI Tool Users across the country can contribute ideas, share best practices, and collaborate on their data visualizations. Please join the community by following this link to Illuminate’s BI Tool User Community. (To participate in the forum, login to Illuminate, click your Control Panel, and select “Illuminate Help Center.” Let me know if you have any trouble logging in!)

If you are interested in contributing to the BI Tool Blog, please email me at: freyherme@illuminateed.net

Sincerely,

Franck Reyherme
BI Tool Specialist

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The CAR Report: Cumulative Assessment Report

By: Brittany Dimick

My name is Brittany Dimick and I am Teacher Assessment Specialist in Salt Lake City School District, which has about 25,000 students. I am the lead specialist on Illuminate and responsible for all reporting and testing. This is my second year at Salt Lake District and using Illuminate, so I still have a lot to learn!

The CAR report, which stands for “Cumulative Assessment Record,” is NOT one of my favorite reports. It’s not pretty, nor does it have any graphs or color. You need to be a teacher to decode it. However, it’s one of the most used reports that I have built in my 1 ½ years of building reports.

I designed this report to be used by special educators who are not in Illuminate as much as classroom teachers in order for them to have an easy way of accessing all the data for an IEP/referral in one place. Boy, do they love it! I don’t usually get thanked by teachers, but when I do it is because of this report. Now that the word is out, principals are using this report so they are up-to-date before they meet with parents or teachers about the student.

Here are middle school and high school examples of this report. Notice the report is grouped by test and sorted from old to current. The score, Proficiency Band, and Proficiency Level vary based on the test, which is why this report is marked “Internal Use Only” because you need to be a teacher to really understand the report. One of the problems I encountered while making this report is size; since there is a lot of data being pulled, I had to restrict the report to run by class.

The base of the report comes from the warehouses (read summary assessments) that we have built in Illuminate that contain multi-year data. Those warehouses have very few columns, featuring only ones that can be maintained from year to year. We have a WIDA, end-of-level, and writing warehouse. Then I pull this data, via SQL, along with other data contained in Illuminate like, current testing, Scholastic Reading Inventory, DIBELS.

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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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