Best Practice Guides

• Planning the Data System
• Managing the Data
• Data Quality Assurance
• Using Data

These documents present best-practice suggestions for approaching all stages of planning, managing, and using an education data system.

Planning the Data System

• LDS
  Traveling Through Time: The Forum Guide to Longitudinal Data Systems, Book I: What is an LDS? (2010)
  This document, the first installment of a four-part Forum guide series on longitudinal data systems (LDS), focuses on the fundamental questions of what an LDS is (and is not), what steps should be taken to achieve a successful system, what components make up an ideal system, and why such a system is of value in education.

• Decision Support
  Forum Guide to Decision Support Systems: A Resource for Educators (2006)
  This document helps readers better understand what decision support systems are, how they are configured, how they operate, and how they might be developed and implemented in an education setting.
• Metadata
  Forum Guide to Metadata: The Meaning Behind Education Data (2009)
  This document offers best practice concepts, definitions, implementation strategies, and templates/tools for an audience of data, technology, and program staff in state and local education agencies. It is hoped that this resource will improve this audience's awareness and understanding of metadata and, subsequently, the quality of the data in the systems they maintain.
• Technology Suite
  Forum Unified Education Technology Suite (2005)
  This compilation of nontechnical guides will help individuals who lack extensive experience with technology to develop a better understanding of the terminology, concepts, and fundamental issues influencing technology acquisition and implementation decisions.
• Facilities
  Facilities Information Management: A Guide for State and Local Education Agencies (2003)
  This Guide provides a framework for identifying a basic set of school facilities data elements and definitions that will meet the information needs of school and community decision makers, school facility managers, and the general public.

Managing the Data

• Disaster Recovery
  Crisis Data Management: A Forum Guide to Collecting and Managing Data About Displaced Students (2010)
  This document provides guidelines that can be used by elementary and secondary education agencies to establish policies and procedures for collecting and managing education data before, during, and after a crisis.
• FERPA/Confidentiality Guides
  
  • Forum Guide to the Privacy of Student Information: A Resource for Schools (2006)
    Forum Guide to Protecting the Privacy of Student Information: State and Local Education Agencies (2004)
    A general overview of privacy laws and professional practices that apply to information collected for, and maintained in, student records.
  • Privacy Issues in Education Staff Records (2000) This Guide summarizes laws that apply to the privacy rights of education staff.
• Race/Ethnicity
  Managing an Identity Crisis: Forum Guide to Implementing New Federal Race and Ethnicity Categories (2008)
  This guide offers State and local education agencies and schools information and how-to tips that will help them as they introduce the 1997 standards for reporting race and ethnicity.
• Virtual Education
  Forum Guide to Elementary/Secondary Virtual Education (2006)
  This guide provides recommendations for collecting accurate, comparable, and useful data about virtual education in an elementary/secondary education setting.

Data Quality Assurance

• Culture of Data Quality
  Forum Guide to Building a Culture of Quality Data: A School and District Resource (2005)
  This short book focuses on how to achieve a "Culture of Quality Data" by focusing on data entry—getting things right at the source. The quality of data will improve when all staff understand how the data will be used and how data become information.
• Curriculum Guide
  Forum Curriculum for Improving Education Data: A Resource for Local Education Agencies (2007)
  Offers training materials to improve the quality of education data collected, used, and reported by school and district staff. It provides lesson plans, instructional handouts, and related resources, and presents concepts necessary to help schools develop a culture for improving data quality.
• Online Education Training
  Improving Education Data Part 1—Creating a Foundation
  Improving Education Data Part 2—Coordinating Data Quality
  Visit SIFA University to take this self-paced online course at no cost.

Using Data

• Data Ethics
  Forum Guide to Data Ethics (2010)
  This document presents a code of ethics for data management in education settings. Its canons, examples, descriptions, and recommendations reflect situations that arise in real schools, school districts, and state education agencies. The guidance is intended to supplement existing data ethics policies in education organizations or serve as a template when organizations create new policies.
• Education Indicators
  Forum Guide to Education Indicators (2005)
  The guide defines a number of key education statistics and offers recommendations and caveats about their use.

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