A Thousand Different Reports. Just Three Clicks.

Powerful, Fast, and Flexible
One of the most iconic reports within Matrix is our lightning fast Drilldown report, which allows school districts to dissect their entire set of data in any way they can imagine using just a few clicks. Our Drilldown report processes huge amounts of information, tens of thousands of data points, in just seconds and groups the data by school, grade, and student sub-groups like gender, race, IEP, and ELL/LEP. Here is a list of typical questions which can be answered using the Drilldown report in just a few movements of the mouse.

• In which school did female Hispanic students score the lowest on the state test? Two clicks.
• Do my 3rd grade free and reduced lunch students score better on the AIMSweb test or Acuity? Two clicks.
• Between all of my elementary schools, which teacher has the highest number of special education students? And how did they perform? Three clicks.

Details are Important
All of the scores in the Drilldown report are color-coded to highlight areas where the district is doing well and areas where the district is struggling. District administrators love to check into the Drilldown whenever new test data is uploaded, so they can get an overall look at how their district performed on the latest assessments. If they see any red-flags they can then instantly dive into the data and determine which student subgroup, teachers, or even classroom course section may have caused a drop in scores. Remember, context is everything, so Matrix will always show the number of students which make up each group and allow you to drilldown to the individual student scores which make up an average.
The Drilldown encompasses all of our main goals with Matrix:

1. Bring all types of data together in powerful, but easy to use reports.
2. See top level data, but be able to get to the details in a couple clicks.
3. Give districts the ability to make decisions by centralizing key performance data.

Are your students college ready?

In secondary education, there’s perhaps no bigger buzzword than “college readiness” right now. School districts are under enormous pressure to produce graduates that are prepared for college-level course work or career-ready skills that will give them an effective transition into the work force. It’s a constant battle every year, particularly after a 2013 ACT survey revealed that only 26 percent of college instructors believed high school graduates were ready for post-secondary classes.

We've got the data...

We’ve spoken to a number of district administrators who have emphasized the importance of being able to use data to help address this challenge and to ensure their graduates are ready for college. The good news is most districts already have a plethora of data they are collecting – whether it’s state assessments, common assessments, EXPLORE, PLAN, ACT, PSAT, SAT, AP test data, demographics, behavior, attendance, etc.

But now what?

Well, it’s a matter of getting the data into a usable format for teachers and administrators to use on a daily basis to guide instruction and improve student performance.  In order to effectively use data, districts need to be able to break it down and analyze trends, student growth, instruction effectiveness, etc.

Get it into the hands of teachers....

Better access to data that is in a usable format takes the guesswork (teachers' perceptions or anecdotal evidence) out of analyzing student performance. Teachers can spend less time trying to make sense of data and more time using it to drive instruction...

And improve performance.

Getting Past the Eye-Candy Test with Elementary Assessment Data

You can call it the “eye-candy test” problem.

It may not be as pronounced in education as it is in baseball. However, in almost every conversation I have with school district administrators we work with, they are focused on this core challenge: How can we make sure our data – not through some anecdotal perception or observation -- supports our decisions about how to improve student performance?

Brad Pitt played Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane in "Moneyball" a story about how the baseball team began using data to try to level the playing field with more profitable teams in the league.

When the concept comes up, I picture the scene in the movie “Moneyball” that depicts Brad Pitt – who plays general manager Billy Beane -- getting fed up with how his old-school baseball scouts are trying to identify the best players so their cash-strapped major league team can compete with the richer teams like the New York Yankees.

“He passes the eye-candy test. He's got the looks. He's great at playing the part. He just needs to get some playing time,” one scout says, while another questions the same player’s confidence because of how good-looking his girlfriend is.

Those more anecdotal observations could be important as a piece of the puzzle, but if you focus on that, decision-making becomes too arbitrary, which is the point of the book and the movie. Statistics and data add so much more.
Read more »

Timeliness is Key for Teachers When Analyzing Performance Data

It's not difficult to find a quote about the importance of good timing. The dangers of procrastination are easily apparent today when the pace of information available to us comes at a break-neck speed via the Internet and social media.

But my favorite quote on timing, which was uttered long ago, surprisingly applies nicely to our world right now, especially when thinking about data and education:

“It gets late early out there.”
- Yogi Berra

In our frequent conversations with school districts and how they use performance data, timing comes up often. One administrator mentioned it’s tough on their schools and teachers when it takes several weeks for the district to receive its NWEA Map results in a usable format. Because of the time lag, teachers often can’t use the last round of results to prepare for the next assessment, which can undermine their purpose of administering predictor assessments to help with student performance.

Otherwise the data can become obsolete because the teachers are not able to analyze it as they prepare their students for the next assessment. Research has shown a huge value of interim assessments is that they are taken several times throughout the year, giving teachers benchmarks to address with the same group of students:

As with annual assessments, interim assessment results generally have the advantage of being comparable across classrooms, but the frequency of their administration means that teachers can use the data to evaluate their own instructional strategies and to track the progress of their current students in a single school year. For instance, data from a district-wide interim
assessment could help illuminate whether the students who were struggling to convert fractions to decimals improved after receiving targeted small group instruction, or whether students’ expository essays  improved after a unit spent reading and analyzing expository writing.

So for districts it’s not a question of if they have the data to help teachers analyze and improve student performance. It’s a matter of getting the data into a format teachers can use and obviously being able to place it in their hands in enough time before it gets too late to use it.

This issue demonstrates where technology will play a huge role, especially the ability to aggregate different types of data quickly. Otherwise, with the Common Core State Standards shift for most states set to occur in 2014-15, as Yogi Berra said: “It will get late early out there” for districts that aren’t thinking about this.

On The Drilldown

Introduction - History

At AllofE, we have clients in fields ranging from K-12 to higher education, from trucking to sports branding analysis. Every sector has its own challenges, and every project we complete gives us new perspectives on how to solve complex problems. The problem of aggregating massive amounts of data and displaying it in an understandable and intelligence-focused fashion is one of the hardest problems we've come across. After a lot of scrap pieces of paper, dried whiteboard markers, and long discussions, we came up with a solution that is easy to use, fast, and brings to light intelligence from data: the Drilldown. Although it was originally developed to solve a problem completely unrelated to student growth, the Drilldown is the best way to display a district's worth of information in an understandable and intuitive manner.

What the Drilldown Shows

Imagine a district's data as one giant table of raw data. Its columns would number in the hundreds, and its rows would number in the thousands. Because of the massive amount of data, extracting intelligence by looking at each and every piece of data is an impossible task. Different groups and cohorts of the data need to be displayed for the data to be truly understood.

The group people are most familiar with is the gender group. Matrix goes through every record in the data warehouse and places the record into one of two cohorts: male students or female students. The average scores for each type of test are then calculate across multiple years, and displayed for analysis. Being able to see the performance of males vs. females for an entire district, from clicking on the Drilldown to seeing the data, takes a matter of seconds. Matrix gives users access to all of their data, and allows them to understand all their data without having to wait hours or days.

The gender group is just one of many different groups the Drilldown uses. The ethnicity group breaks down data into even finer cohorts. Lets say a district administrator wants to know which ethnicity their teachers need to focus on more than others. By building a cohort for each ethnicity, Matrix can quickly show the performance for each ethnicity, and allow that administrator to quickly find which ethnicity teachers need to focus on.

The gender and ethnicity groups are two of the groups Matrix shows based on student demographics. Our data warehouse also connects together schedules and enrollments with students, and allows the Drilldown to show groups based on grade level and school. The district administrator from the ethnicity group may also want to know how much students are growing as they progress through the district. By looking at cohorts in the grade level group, they can see if there is positive growth through each grade level. They can also see the growth in each particular school to get an even deeper sense of how students are moving during their time in the district.

Combining Groups

Up to this point, the questions asked of the Drilldown have only been asked at a district level. Questions like "how well are we reaching 3rd grade males vs. 3rd grade females" or "which ethnicity is performing the best in an elementary schools" are questions that the Drilldown can also answer. Every cohort is clickable and allows you to zoom in or drilldown (where the name came from) to see a more focused picture of the district.

The first question, "how well are we reaching 3rd grade males vs. 3rd grade females," can be answered by one click of the mouse. By going to the grade level group and clicking on the 3rd grade cohort, the Drilldown refreshes itself to show data tied specifically to 3rd grades. Middle and High Schools will no longer show up under the school group, and 3rd grade will be the only entry in the grade level group. The data in the gender group shows performance of males and females in 3rd grade. In a manner of seconds, the Drilldown has answered a question some districts have spent days trying to answer. The Drilldown also allows for the performance of 4th grade males vs. 4th grade females to be answered in a similar manner.

Clicking on a cohort in the Drilldown allows the lens to be focused on specific parts of a district. It's easy to see that this method of filtering allows for finer and finer views of a district to be constructed and understood. Moving between cohorts like 3rd and 4th grade is also an easy process. Each filter is shown at the bottom of the Drilldown, and can be removed by clicking on it. The answer the previous question to about gender performance in 4th grade can be found by clicking on the existing 3rd grade filter, then filtering by the 4th grade cohort. The process of adding and removing filters allows users with any level of technical experience to understand student performance in their district in a manner of seconds.

Exports, Printing, and Detail Data

Matrix is an application that is accessible by anyone that has a computer and an Internet connection. It is also an application that recognizes the value of extracting data out of it. Being able to print a grid or save what's visible on the screen into a spreadsheet is possible throughout the system. The Drilldown takes the guesswork out of saving information for a presentation or for later analysis by offering both Export and Print buttons.

Along with printing and exporting, the Drilldown has the ability to display all of the underlying data used to create its filtered view. By clicking on the Detail Data button, users are shown the student level data used to create the Drilldown. Matrix makes it possible to move from a view of the entire district down to a set of 10 students within four or five clicks. The Detail Data is also exportable and printable, and can also display a student's entire history with just one click.

Conclusion - Answering Questions

The Drilldown was designed to answer questions a user may have about the performance in their district. Questions an administrator, principal, or teacher may have about student performance are answerable with a few clicks. Thanks to the Drilldown, the long, cumbersome process of answering one question at a time from a spreadsheet thousands of lines long is now fast, efficient, and possible for any user within a manner of seconds.