June 2004 — Advertorial
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Connecting People and Information to Improve Student Achievement
An important, yet subtle, factor about technology as it has been used more in schools is its impact on the vision of a school district. Most districts have one or more components of the four noted above. When the educators in those high-performing schools see all the parts connected and working together, their vision for technology becomes clearer. More important, their vision for increasing student achievement for individual students as well as entire schools becomes more focused. They see more accurate and consistent data about students, as well as clear displays of a vast array of data that they can turn into specific action in the classroom tomorrow.
A Focus on the Student
Without the technology, the only common connecting element in education is the student. What if everything describing the student (demographics), everything the student d'es (learning), and everything illustrating what a student knows and is able to do (performance demonstrating learning) were connected? One student information system with the same naming conventions used for all aspects of a student's tenure in a school district saves time and increases the accuracy of the data throughout the system.
To illustrate, let's look at one student - Emma, who is transferring from another district in the same state - to see how this technology, just coming of age, will change the education system for her benefit.
When Emma enrolls in school, enrollment data about her is entered into a student information system one time. This is the last time this information needs to be entered. She is placed into a fourth-grade class, and her name and information is linked to the teacher, the grade, the school and the district. Emma's teacher sees her on the roster and in her gradebook instantaneously.
When in class the following week, Emma takes a math test online that is tied to the district and state standards. The results of the test are available to Emma's teacher, her principal and educators at the district office. So are the results of all fourth-grade students who took the test. The results can be disaggregated and analyzed in a variety of ways. Emma's teacher wants to know how each of her students is doing on each standard tested. Emma's principal is piloting two different textbooks and wants to know if the results are different in those two classes. She also is interested in whether or not teachers who took the extended summer academy in small-group instruction are having different results from those who did not go to the academy. In the central office, the math curriculum coordinator is interested in the difference in results across campuses and across demographic groups. Emma's campus had particular problems with reading graphs, so the coordinator begins plans for appropriate professional development activities for the teachers.
The next day in class, Emma found out that she did very well on all standards except the one on fractions. Her teacher has scheduled 15 minutes a day for Emma to learn about fractions. She also e-mailed Emma's parents about resources they could use at home to address the performance gap.
What is going on here is the power of connection among four key elements: an instruction system for the teacher, an assessment system, and a reporting system that can use disparate sources of information, all tied into a student information system using the same baseline student data.
