June 2004 — Advertorial
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Connecting People and Information to Improve Student Achievement
We live in a connected world. While this is a cliché today, it was a revelation in 1979 when James Burke's Connections appeared on public television. It was an odd choice for a title in that 1979 was a comparatively "unconnected" age. The personal computer had been introduced several years earlier and names like Commodore PET and TRS-80 were populating science magazines. An information age was on the threshold. Connections offered a context and direction to the changes taking place around us. We now live in the world Burke predicted.
Burke's idea states that when people, things or ideas come together in new ways, the rules of arithmetic are changed so that one plus one equals three. This is the fundamental mechanism of innovation. The result is always more than the sum of its parts. Every time there is an improvement in technology in which ideas and people come together, a major change ensues. The opportunity for the educational community to take advantage of this ensuing change now exists.
Over the 30 or so years since technology related to students has been introduced into schools, the focus has been on managing student information on the administrative side and providing supplemental instruction to students. As technology has become more sophisticated and ubiquitous in schools, its use has spread throughout all facets of education. An early use of technology - student information systems - has become more common and highly robust in its power. The use of technology around instruction has changed dramatically with students using the Internet for research, making presentations using technology, etc.
As standards-based instruction and the focus on accountability have grown over the last decade, technology's role has grown in importance. Research surrounding high-performing schools shows that there are four important uses of technology in these schools:
- A student information system to store and manage data connected to students.
- An instructional management system to assist teachers with record keeping, such as attendance and gradebooks, as well as manage resources for instruction.
- A student assessment program with test creation and reporting capabilities.
- A data management/data analysis tool to help teachers and administrators use data coming from disparate assessments.
The final two components are relatively new, but critically important as schools try to fully understand what students know and are able to do during the school year.
In most districts, however, none of the four functions are connected to each other. In other words, the attendance "d'es not talk" to the gradebook nor d'es it talk to tests. These typically are isolated experiences and neither the experiences nor the data produced by them are connected to each other. One result of this lack of connectivity is that data must be re-entered into systems, sometimes daily. This takes the time of the clerk in a district office, a teacher and/or a guidance counselor. It also offers the opportunity to introduce errors either through typographical mistakes or different naming conventions. For example, Deborah, when enrolling, becomes Debbie in the classroom; Jim E. Smith becomes Jimmy Smith. In addition, important data such as past attendance could provide valuable information to a teacher about specific students.
