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Concurrent Session XI Presentations

Friday, February 25, 2011
8:30 - 9:30


XI–A: Value Added Assessments for Teachers and Principals in Race to the Top Applications: Implications for the Profession

Candace Kelly-Hodge, University of Southern California

    Race to the Top (RTTT) is a competitive grant program from the U.S. Department of Education that offers state education agencies an opportunity to build on existing and significant reform promoting ambitious yet achievable goals across four core educational areas described in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The core educational areas are (a) adopting internationally benchmarked standards and assessments for success in college and the workplace, (b) building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals in how they can improve practices, (c) increasing teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in teacher distribution, and (d) turning around the lowest-achieving schools. This presentation will examine how value-added assessment systems were defined and applied to evaluate the effectiveness of classroom teachers and principals across a number of winning proposals. The following issues in these proposals will be discussed: race, social class, and the educational needs of English language learners and students with special needs. The presentation encourages participants to reflect on the impact value-added programs may have on current methods and approaches.

XI–B: Enhancing Program Evaluation With Program Monitoring: An Application of Moodle and SAS Business Intelligence

Bo Yan and Mike Slagle, Blue Valley School District (Kansas)

    Many districts adopt and implement intervention programs to help at-risk students. However, educators usually do not know whether a program works and if there are issues in the program until evaluation at the end of implementation. To address this problem, we developed a data system that collects program implementation data using the database module of Moodle (an open source learning management system), which automatically and intelligently delivers alerts and reports to stakeholders using the SAS Business Intelligence framework. With the system, stakeholders receive alerts whenever issues occur in program implementation and reports about the effect of the program on a regular basis.

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XI–C: Diné Education Is Our Strength: Using Data to Empower the Navajo Nation

Kalvin White, Office of Diné Science, Math, and Technology, Navajo Nation

    This presentation will address the Department of Diné Education, Navajo Nation's documentation of how data has assisted them in improving the quality of education on the Navajo Nation resulting in a major legislative change on the Navajo Nation. It will address the benefits of the systemic reform model implemented on the Navajo Nation for the last ten years and highlight the impact of data-driven decisionmaking as it relates to student achievement, improving instruction, and infusing Navajo culture and language into core academic content areas.

XI–D: Data Fellows Program: Turning Education Data Into Gold for Policy Leaders and Practitioners

Linda Hargrove, Kathy Cox, and David Mead; Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board
Gary Hanson, College for All Texans Foundation

    The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board's Data Fellows Program was designed to provide training and receive feedback from small groups of 8 to 20 school district and higher education administrators on secondary-to-postsecondary data. Panelists will discuss program concepts and goals, types of training delivered, and how feedback from participants was used to develop new prototypes for online tabular and graphical data summaries. Panelists also will address questions regarding success of the training, types of data summaries that may be most useful, and most feasible or effective ways to share and inform use of these data by policy leaders and practitioners. Time also will be reserved for audience participation and interaction.

XI–E: CUPID: Using a Central Unique Person ID to Link Data Systems

Daniel Domagala, Colorado Department of Education

    In the noble quest to efficiently share longitudinal data across disparate state information systems (such as human/social services, K-12, higher education, labor/workforce, revenue/finance, corrections, or any other entity), one approach is to create a unique master identifier (Central Unique Person ID—CUPID) to which local identifiers such as a student ID can map. This presentation will dive into the "Person ID" hub methodology and discuss associated challenges, such as data quality, privacy, and governance.

XI–F: From Frustration to Fantastic: A Decade in the Making

Michael Baethke and Marlene Dorenkamp, Iowa Department of Education

    Iowa's quest for data quality in collecting and reporting district-level information was catapulted into the 21st century with the development of Fall Basic Education Data Survey (BEDS) 2010. With the remnants of earlier data collection instruments limiting capacity, creating bottlenecks, and frustrating users, Iowa revamped its staff data collection application using the latest Microsoft ASP.NET framework to enhance user experience, involved end-users in the development and assessment process, and partnered with commercial vendors to ensure data quality for reporting purposes. The result was the development of a user-friendly application that has been described as fun, functional, and fantastic!

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XI–G: The Right People for the Task of Data Governance: It Makes a Difference

Bobbi Stettner-Eaton, U.S. Department of Education

    It's not always who you know. In the case of data governance, it's what you know and how well you work with others. Data governance, in the age of longitudinal data systems, has become highly visible and extremely important. And those who serve on data governance boards must be able to function in a number of roles and be flexible enough to get the task of governing data done. States will discuss which representatives on their data governance boards are the most effective and why, how to work the system to ensure that the "right" people get appointed/assigned as data stewards, and other helpful tips. There will be sufficient time to interact with panel members.

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XI–H: The Student Growth Paradox

Neal Gibson, Arkansas Research Center

    What is the relationship between a sixth grade student's growth in math compared to the same student's growth in literacy? The answer may surprise you. Since Student Growth Percentiles are evenly distributed among quantiles based on prior year performance, they behave fundamentally differently from data that exhibit a normal distribution. These differences will be visually demonstrated in order to facilitate discussion about the impact of these differing behaviors as we look to use measures of growth at the district, school, teacher, and student levels.