Data Tools Aim to Predict Student Performance

Leora Itzhaki, right, an academic facilitator for Elizabeth Lane Elementary School in Matthews, N.C., talks to 1st grade teacher Elizabeth Bridges about student work.

—Jason E. Miczek for Digital Directions

How data can forecast future struggles or success for students

Education leaders in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district are scrutinizing the habits and grades of elementary school students to determine who may fall off track and fail to graduate from high school a decade or more from now.

They don't need a crystal ball to make predictions. Officials in the 141,000-student district are relying on a "risk-factor scorecard" to help them spot children who are in jeopardy of becoming dropouts and then deploy resources to help them change course.

Using high-tech data analytics to examine grades, attendance, course failures, declines in grade point average, and disciplinary incidents, Charlotte-Mecklenburg's scorecard system, which was put in place during the 2010-11 school year, predicts even after the first few months of kindergarten which students are at risk.

District leaders, principals, and classroom teachers are using the information to make decisions about how to deploy resources all across the district.

"This information is very powerful," says Scott Muri, the district's chief information officer. "This helps to inform our decisionmaking process about children, budget processes, and human resources. Decisions at every level can be impacted by this."

From the moment children enter kindergarten, school districts begin collecting information about them. And for years, many districts have tried to build data systems that organize that information and make sense of it. For some districts—and some states—those systems are finally mature enough to look into the future, by using complex data analytics to predict which indicators mean students may go off track down the line.

Some districts use such predictive analysis as an early-warning system for who is at risk of failing to graduate. Others view it through the lens of higher education to determine which students are unlikely to be college-ready by graduation.

Sixteen states now produce early-warning systems that flag students not on track to graduate from high school and relay that information to districts, and 18 others have plans to institute similar systems, according to a November 2011 study by Civic Enterprises, a Washington-based policy firm, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.

"Schools are kind of on overload when it comes to collecting data and talking about data," says Mindee O'Cummings, a senior research analyst for the Washington-based American Institutes for Research and co-team leader for the National High School Center's early warning system, which is working with several states and districts to implement the center's free early-warning system for high school students and is also developing one for middle school students.

"But when they can really apply that knowledge to make a difference," she says, "I see a kind of rejuvenation of energy around using data."

'Work Smarter, Not Harder'

Many of the predictive models start with 9th graders, but others, like the one ...

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