by Richard Wenning and Damian Betebenner

The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) supports and serves 178 school districts that educate more than 800,000 preK-12 students statewide. The CDE also serves adult education and the state’s libraries. Three years ago, CDE approached the nonprofit National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (NCIEA)—whose mission is to help improve student achievement through enhanced practices in educational assessment and accountability—to jointly create a new way for parents, educators, administrators, and policymakers to analyze, view, and understand school performance data.

Colorado Growth Model
The CDE and NCIEA wanted to develop a model that moved conversations away from disconnected, annual discussions of student status toward continuous, year-over-year discussions of student growth. The two organizations started by creating the Colorado Growth Model, an analytical tool that tracks each student’s academic growth and achievement history. The model focuses on whether each student’s growth is adequate to reach and maintain desired levels of achievement, particularly proficiency on state assessments and
postsecondary workforce readiness.

With the model in place, the CDE knew it had the correct metrics to transform educational data use statewide, but it needed a way to turn this data into the information and knowledge necessary to enable transformation. To do so, the CDE embarked on a path that moves away from the traditional model of enterprise data use.

Using the model, the CDE worked to develop a system to get data to improve statewide educational programs to the correct personnel in a timely fashion. The state of Colorado collects millions of data elements on schools— from performance to location to student and school demographics. But historically, few people have had access to this data, and those who did still lacked the ability to view it and ascertain why certain students and schools were improving while others were not.

Rather than focusing primarily on the goal of assembling the data (and expecting the data to speak for itself ), the CDE focused on getting the correct data to the correct people. This allows stakeholders to use the data more efficiently. The CDE also wanted to go beyond traditional data spreadsheets and HTML charts with dynamic data visualizations to make the data come alive and inspire the user to explore and collaborate over the information—ultimately changing the understanding people have about education.

Enter SchoolView
Inspired by the Web 2.0 revolution of user-centered design and social networking, the CDE decided to apply these philosophies, designs, and associated technologies to data visualization and communication, helping to turn data into useful information for a wide variety of education stakeholders.

The result is SchoolView, the umbrella project under which Colorado is pursuing its wide-ranging agenda for its longitudinal data and instructional improvement systems. SchoolView is a unique Web 2.0 platform that enables all key stakeholders—from parents to school leaders to policymakers—to view, sort, and compare statewide educational performance data using highly visual, clickable dashboards, graphs, and maps. The platform’s website offers several easy-to-use data visualization tools to make it simple for users to understand how a child, classroom, school, or district is performing relative to others in the state.

In tandem, the Colorado Growth Model and SchoolView connect different stakeholders around a common indicator of individual student growth, illustrating how actions and performance at the individual, school, district, and statewide level are connected. By connecting the micro-level data with a macro view, stakeholders can convene around a single platform and set of indicators to discuss educational performance.

SchoolView aims to provide students, parents, teachers, principals, and administrators with meaningful support and actionable information to systemically manage continuous instructional improvement, including

• instructional planning
• information gathering, such as formative, interim, and summative assessments, and student work in graphical, audio, or video formats
• information analysis, with the support of real-time analysis and reporting
• evaluation of the effectiveness and return-oninvestment of specific actions.

SchoolView also promotes collaborative problem solving and action planning, and it integrates instructional data with student-specific data, such as attendance, discipline, grades, and credit accumulation, to provide early warning indicators of a student’s risk of educational failure.

The platform was created to serve distinct user groups with different information needs and uses. Parents and teachers tend to want to see data at the individual student level, whereas administrators and policymakers want a 40,000-foot view.

Educators, for example, will be able to examine interim and benchmark assessment results using engaging interfaces to support instructional planning. They also can access and contribute to effective practices identified for specific categories of students or instructional situations. Meanwhile, policymakers can examine summary information at the state level and easily investigate student achievement and growth through various lenses, including school type such as charter schools or online schools, location, poverty, and other school demographic characteristics.

Building SchoolView
The CDE and the NCIEA realized they needed a private-sector technology partner to develop the comprehensive data visualization tools that form the SchoolView portal. They hired digital solutions agency Universal Mind to build a series of sophisticated web-based tools that would interface with Colorado’s massive databases of educational performance information.

Because Universal Mind’s capabilities span both systems integration and digital design, it was able to handle the technical complexities of the data environment and develop the visualizations, as well as design an intuitive user experience that served the needs of a wide range of different stakeholders. Universal Mind’s user-experience designers first created a series of sketches and diagrams that initially helped stakeholders gain a common understanding of the project. To manage costs, the team brought the application to life gradually, adding levels of fidelity without building out a lot of technical code. This enabled it to refine concepts affordably as they went. Working with a single technology vendor reduced costs and enabled the CDE and the NCIEA to work more efficiently and quickly.

Early Results
SchoolView was rolled out in August 2009 and is already hugely popular among parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers. The application currently distributes summary measures and individualized student reports for more than 450,000 students statewide. As individual password-protected access to sensitive data is fully implemented, these reports—together with summary measures across all relevant subgroups—will be available to authorized personnel statewide.

SchoolView’s goal to provide a balanced, public scorecard that is accessible to anyone and easy-tounderstand through clear visual representation can be a very powerful motivator for change. For example, one principal, who was convinced his students were making strong progress toward state goals, learned by using SchoolView that, in fact, his students were not progressing as well as other students across the state. Never having been able to compare progress on a state level, the principal had been relying on his own measures of student growth. Gaining a clear understanding of one’s relative performance against standards is essential information for school improvement.

Educational Accountability System
The SchoolView project has already had a major impact on legislation and policy. By making complex data available to the public in an easy-to-visualize way, SchoolView has become the underpinning of a new Educational Accountability System in Colorado that oversees how Colorado evaluates schools, develops improvement strategies, and allocates resources. SchoolView was also recently recognized by the National Council for Measurement in Education (NCME) for its outstanding dissemination of educational measurement concepts to the public.

Recovery Act Support
Widespread support for SchoolView has also translated into a commitment from Colorado Governor Bill Ritter to invest $2.5 million of discretionary Recovery Act funds to ensure  that all of Colorado’s 178 school districts, nearly 1,800 schools, and more than 25,000 teachers use the portal.

The initiative has also spread to other states. By creating an open source model in the Colorado Growth Model, the CDE envisioned other states as co-developers of the materials required for successful use of the data. From its initial stages of development, the Colorado Growth Model was intended to be used regardless of any future scaling (vertical or nonvertical scale) or technical alterations associated with the state assessment. As such, it is suitable for use with any annual state assessment system. This broad applicability has led a dozen other states to investigate and implement the model, including Massachusetts, Indiana, New York, and Virginia.

What’s Next for SchoolView?
The next version of SchoolView offers even more sophisticated data visualization tools, such as applications that enable educators and administrators to access and analyze classroom-level and individual student growth metrics, as well as print reports showing how student groups and individual students are performing relative to their academic peers. Users also will be able to share visualizations on Facebook or Twitter to drive deeper discussion around the topic of school performance.

The CDE also is planning to integrate online learning applications to better enable school districts to provide blended learning and instructional opportunities. Significantly expanding the availability and depth of online course offerings will increase student achievement and improve teacher effectiveness, and impact students’ post-secondary workforce readiness and college readiness.

Just as other states have learned from Colorado by embracing its growth model, Colorado hopes to tap into the wisdom and creative insights of other states in the development of all the associated content on which the utility of the model rests. To this end, the CDE has encouraged the formation of a consortium of states to share and co-develop the data visualization technologies associated with the Colorado Growth Model and to move toward deployment of this visualization technology into a cloud-based site that will promote the rapid sharing of insights and developments that each state brings to the table.

Indeed, the Internet has transformed how people exchange information, collaborate on ideas, and gain knowledge, with dynamic, real-time communities forming around specific areas of interest that leverage blogs, wikis, forums, user groups, and social networks. The CDE proposes to use this same web-based model to link parents, educators, students, researchers, and other education stakeholders into powerful, collaborative learning communities. These tools will break down the barriers of location, time, and access to resources to deliver the information needed for professional development, instructional materials, and other educational content and collaboration crucial to improving student achievement.

Richard Wenning is the associate commissioner for the Colorado Department of Education, where his responsibilities include public policy development and the design and implementation of Colorado’s educational accountability system, including SchoolView and the Colorado Growth Model. Contact him at Wenning_R@cde.state.co.us.

Damian Betebenner is a senior associate with the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, where his current responsibilities focus on assisting states in the implementation of student growth models. Contact him at dbetebenner@nciea.org.