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.

AP Predictor: Using Data to Drive Decisions

The AP Predictor report in Matrix is designed to identify students who are likely to do well in AP courses, so staff can be sure those students know about their AP course options. The predictive element is taken from research published by The College Board showing a strong correlation between PLAN scores and scores on specific AP tests. They provide a list of AP tests and their associated PLAN subscores and cut scores. For example, according to The College Board, students whose PLAN Math and Science scores average at least 26 have a 75% chance of scoring a 3 or better on the AP Microeconomics test.

Of course you could do this math by hand or in a spreadsheet, but your PLAN scores are already in Matrix, so why not let Matrix do the work for you? The AP Predictor report knows which PLAN subscores go with each AP test, and automatically calculates the relevant average when you select an AP test from the menu. You can filter by student name and minimum AP success category (e.g. only students with a 50% chance of scoring 3+ on the selected AP test), and sort by any of the scores.

Coming up with ways to display historical data that make it easier to absorb is a cornerstone of Matrix, but it's always exciting to build an interface that directly helps educators make decisions about the future.

Everyone has data. Our goal is to have everyone use it.

You have the data. We've spent the last few weeks getting it all from your piles of spreadsheets and student information system into Matrix. Now what do you do?
Luckily, Matrix isn't just a data warehouse. Yes, Matrix stores all kinds of data ranging from Fountas and Pinnell to the ACT to AIMSweb and even attendance, behavior, and assignment grades, but the real power of Matrix is in the dashboarding and reporting tools which allow districts to use all of their data to make game-changing decisions for their schools, teachers, and students.

Using Key Performance Indicators

An Index Measure is a numeric value assigned to a student based on various key performance indicators (KPIs) like attendance percentage or test proficiency. This allows us to normalize different academic areas which could never have been viewed on the same scale before. We can then use these student Index Measures to determine school, grade, teacher, and district performance.

Using Index Measures for College Readiness
An increasingly important and popular Index Measure is college/career readiness. Because every district does college readiness slightly differently, the Index Measure can be customized to include any set of KPIs and performance levels. For this example we will look at a college readiness measure which has two performance levels: “college ready” and “not college ready.”
Just showing up is a huge part of college and career success, so the first thing we are going to include is a student's attendance percentage. Let's say if a student has 90% attendance or better we will give them a point. These points will come into play when we determine how college ready a student is.
Next let's look at classroom and assessment performance. In the classroom, we can expect a student to have earned a C or better in their Algebra class to be at the level they need for college mathematics. We also expect the student to have scored at least a 21 on the ACT exam. Now combining all of these KPIs we can come up with the college/career readiness percentage for a student and aggregate it for a teacher or school.

Making it Easy
Index Measures are adaptive and completely customizable. Add new tests or academic indicators to any Index Measure at any time with no manual calculations. Matrix makes it easy: just pick the students and key performance indicators and let the system do the rest. Spend your time using data not finding it.

Behavior Documentation and Tracking for K-12

Helping districts use data to take more proactive steps towards behavior incidents. 

To effectively analyze and improve a student’s performance, teachers often need access to data beyond a student’s test scores. One example of such data is behavior. As with other types of data analysis, the more detailed and more rich the data is, the better we are at noticing trends and making decisions using it.

The Matrix Behavior Documentation module facilitates this process by providing a quick and easy way for teachers to track behavior incidents at a detailed level.

It gives administrators a comprehensive view of behavior across the entire district, at a building level, and at an individual student level. The district can look at this data in a number of different ways including yearly data, monthly data, referral type (proactive or reactive measure), physical location of the incident, time of day the incident occurred, and more.

 Behavior data is then aggregated at a student level for analysis with the student’s attendance, assessment or test scores, and demographics to give teachers and administrators a comprehensive picture of student progress and performance. This also allows the administration to make policy decisions like having additional adults at lunch or bus time to reduce the number of behavior incidents.

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.

K-12 Challenges Related to Data Mining and Reporting

It is no secret that school districts are facing challenges from every which direction these days. It is also no secret that before a problem can be solved, one must know exactly what the problem is. So in this blog I want to focus on what exactly the problems are that school districts are having with data mining and reporting. These are important areas to focus on because schools look at data in order to make informed decisions on how to best educate their students. If school districts are having trouble accessing and understanding data, then how can they begin to improve their teaching methods and curricula?

The problems that most school districts are struggling with can be classified into three categories: Data Aggregation, Usefulness, and Resources.

Data Aggregation

No matter the size of the school district, data that schools collect can be overwhelming, especially if the data isn’t uniform in nature. Being able to see aggregated data allows the user to catch possible errors and better understand how the figure was produced.

• It is very difficult for school districts to aggregate data from multiple sources, including state assessments, MAP, EOC, Acuity, AIMSweb, ACT, Plan, Explore, and more.

• Data that is derived from multiple sources comes in different formats and structures, which means it can take hours to get the data from just one assessment into a format that is actually usable.

• Once data is aggregated, it is often hard to read and understand. Districts generally have to have a data administrator who can make sense of it all.

• Data is often not clean.

• If it is clean, administrators and teachers will often not even get to see it themselves. Generally reports only show what the final calculations have produced – perhaps a score, an average, or a graph – not the data that was used in the calculation.

Usefulness

Data only has value if it can be turned into information and knowledge, then action.

• Typically, districts end up with either very simplistic reports that don't meet their needs or the reports are so complex that it requires their staff to commit to months of training, and the reports still never get used.

• In a lot of cases districts end up with just one year’s worth of data that is tied to only a student. There is no correlation of that student’s score to the teacher, class, other students in the class, other assessments the student took, previous year’s assessment scores, demographics, grade level, etc. Looking at data in the context of several other related data sets can significantly affect the outcome of a decision.

• It is difficult to relate performance back to the state learning standards. How do districts know which standards need more attention when the resulting reports do not make clear which questions were associated to which standards?

• Data is used to determine teacher and student performance levels, but districts often only have the resources to take into account state-wide assessment data. The best way to indicate a student or teacher’s performance level is holistically and to do that many other data sets would need to come into play.

• Even when data and reports provide value, it is difficult to effectively share that information with each faculty member so that they know on a regular basis what their students’ performance levels are and where they need to improve.

Resources

Implementing a system that creates a greater strain in other areas may not provide the greatest value in the end.

• For districts that are able to make multiple correlations between data sets (i.e. student’s current score to their last test score, or the class’s average, gender’s average), it is an EXTREMELY time consuming process and requires someone that has a very good understanding of the data structure in their SIS as well as the technical ability to write queries to retrieve such data.

• Training staff and faculty to be able to use, read, and understand the resulting reports can take a long time and require constant support.

• Enterprise level systems typically come with an astronomical cost - making it very cost prohibitive, especially for smaller school districts, to take advantage.

• Deciding to integrate a data mining system into a school district can require a huge investment from everyone involved.

These challenges often result in district personnel spending a lot of internal resources (personnel, time, money) to just make sense of the basic data and then to try to use that data to build meaningful reports. Correlating this data back to the classroom and curriculum is almost impossible.

Yet, that is what is needed for the advancement of students.

And isn’t that the overall goal of our education system?