STATS-DC 2008 NCES Data Conference
 

Concurrent Session IV Presentations


Thursday, July 31, 2008
8:30am–9:30am


 
IV–A Data Sharing Across the Educational Pipeline
Nancy Smith, Data Quality Campaign
    The focus and energy around data sharing activities between SEAs and postsecondary institutions continue to grow. The DQC is hosting a series of regional meetings on this topic and working with its partners to build awareness and political will to increase data linkages. In this session, the presenter shared what is being learned from key stakeholders across the country, and participants heard from their peers in a few states what their experiences, hurdles, and successful strategies have been.

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Sessions in LDS track:

 
IV–B New Developments in the NAEP High School Transcript Study
Janis Brown, U.S. Department of Education
Jennifer Laird, MPR Associates, Inc.
    Many states are considering whether and how to incorporate transcripts into their longitudinal student data systems. New developments in the NAEP High School Transcript Study (HSTS) may help states think through considerations such as how to structure, organize, access, and analyze transcript data. Presenters described new developments in the HSTS, including 1) a pilot state sample in 2009 which will collect transcript data from one state, and 2) the newly-available NAEP Data Explorer for the HSTS, an online data tool for accessing and analyzing the HSTS data.

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Sessions in Statewide LDS track:

 
IV–C SEAs, LEAs and Schools—What are they?
Barbara Timm, U. S. Department of Education, EDFacts
Lee Hoffman, National Center for Education Statistics
    Education data are reported by education units. This session looked at how education units are defined and how data are reported to ED for the Common Core of Data and program performance reporting. The session described the recent work done by the U.S. Department of Education's data governance team to produce better understanding about when a "school" is a school and a "school district" is a school district. Providing clarity to these kinds of questions about education units, and gaining a consensus about what other education words and terms mean, remain an ongoing challenge of managing any large information system.

Sessions in EDEN/EDFacts track:

 
IV–D Encouraging Data Use for Instructional Improvement
Tim Magner and Hugh Walkup
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology
    The online School 2.0 eToolkit (www.school2-0.org) is designed to help schools, districts, and communities develop a common education vision and explore how that vision can be supported by technology.

Sessions in Federal track:

 
IV–E Using an Interactive Decision Support System to Analyze Educational Results and Make Data Driven Decisions
Sam Pernici, Louisiana Department of Education
Mark Mossavat, MMCS Consulting

    Louisiana and its partner provided participants with a demonstration of the state's comprehensive educational decision support software that is currently being piloted in the state. This software is an interactive, browser-based system that provides three levels of functionalities for its users:

      As a large data warehouse, it provides up to six years of longitudinal educational data and reports containing close to 4,000,000 unique pieces of data items. As an interactive reporting facility, it makes all educational results and data items selectable. All results can then be displayed in both graphical and table format with comparisons to related information for proper context. As a powerful analysis tool, it provides an interactive, intuitive, point and click forum for multi-level analysis and examination of the data.

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IV–F Deeper Into Data and Geographic Scope: National, State, and Local Insights-Part 3
Tai Phan, National Center for Education Statistics
Mike Lippman, Blue Raster LLC
George Dailey and Former Governor Jim Geringer, ESRI

    The New School District Demographics Website—the opening portion of this session—explored the changes coming to the School District Demographics System (SDDS). The SDDS website of the National Center for Education Statistics has added 2005 and 2006 ACS single-year school district data and 2006 ACS school district special tabulations. The new map viewer software is the ESRI's ArcGIS 9.2; it is an upgrade from the previous ArcIMS version 4.x. The new software allows us to add more options to the map viewer and reduce the processing time at NCES servers; therefore, more data users can access to map viewer without any lag.

    The final 20-25 minutes of this session included an overall wrap-up to the territory covered across the entire multi-hour GIS strand. All presenters in the three GIS sessions took part in the discussion. Questions, issues, and thoughts on next steps were covered.

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Sessions in GIS strand:

Sessions in Federal track:

 
IV–G The Pieces and Parts of Our LDS System and How SIF Interoperability Plays an Important Part
Peter Coleman, Virginia Department of Education
    As we begin the second phase of our SLDS grant project, it is important to look at how all the various pieces and parts come together to make up a comprehensive interoperable longitudinal data system. The presenters discussed the various components, how they determined the phases of the project, timeline and how they are working with the divisions and their vendors in implementing their vision.

Sessions in SIF track:

 
IV–H A Code of Ethics for Data People—Roundtable by Data Ethics Taskforce
Tom Purwin, Jersey City Public Schools (New Jersey)
David Uhlig, Charlottesville City Public Schools (Virginia)
Stephen Q. Cornman, National Center for Education Statistics
Tom Szuba, Quality Information Partners
    Management information staff work under laws that safeguard the confidentiality of student data and technical standards that govern the quality of data and the data systems that produce them. But what about data ethics? There are many day-to-day decisions about data collection, access, and use that require a different kind of judgment. This session was an update on the work of the National Forum on Education Statistics to develop a simple set of ethnical canons to help data managers in this area. The Data Code of Ethics will complement applicable federal and state statutes and regulations, and provide examples to facilitate understanding of legal and ethical issues. Task force members shared an overview of the guidebook under development, including a draft of the Code of Ethics, and request feedback on the direction of this effort.

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Sessions in Forum track:

 
IV–I What More to Say About Metadata? A Multi-State Panel Discussion
Tom Ogle, Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
Edward Giroux, Rhode Island Department of Education
Joe Rabenstine, Maryland State Department of Education
Helen Smetheram, Johns Hopkins University
    Missouri lead a multi-state panel discussion about best practices and collaboration opportunities associated with data inventory, mapping, and dictionary maintenance. Examples of each state's metadata repositories were compared and contrasted.

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Sessions in Forum track:

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