September 14, 2011
WADE: A new tool for studying education achievement data
A new interactive tool for viewing Washington state education achievement at UW Bothell’s Center for Education Data Researchs website has boosted traffic on the site, with more hits coming daily.
Thats because the tool, called the Washington Achievement Data Explorer — or WADE for short — makes it easy to view and compare different sets of educational achievement data from 2002 to 2010, and even see how those comparisons change over time.
Its all created from publicly available information from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, said Dan Goldhaber, director of the center. “We put it up, I think, in a way that allows for people to digest a variety of different data elements simultaneously.
“Its different to say, ‘theres a connection between free and reduced-price lunches and student achievement and to give someone a number than having them see the relationship visually,” he added.
All the information is viewable in three forms: as a line, bar or bubble chart. Sliding a navigation bar at the bottom forward chronologically from 2002 shows how those numbers changed over time for all the selected districts.
There are two main views. In the first, users can see school district achievement data (based on standardized test scores) showing the state average and the percentage of students in each district meeting the standards from 2002 to 2010.
You can compare districts with each other, or each with the state average, and with an extraordinary amount of detail. Data sets are available based on district characteristics such as the breakdown of state and federal funding, the percent of students in special education programs, the education and experience levels of teachers, per-pupil spending and more. Or you can view data filtered by gender, race or poverty level (as indicated by the percent of free and reduced-price lunches). Academic indicators you can use are the percentage of students meeting state standards in science and math.
In the second view, numbers are adjusted to show the difference between actual and predicted performance. “One piece of new information weve put in there is a statistical model that predicts what percentage of students would be meeting the state standards in different grades,” Goldhaber said. A positive residual shows the students in the district performed better than expected, he explained, while a negative residual in the second view indicates they performed worse than expected.
He said he intends to use the program himself “to illustrate to people the findings that are substantiated by more sophisticated analysis.”
Goldhaber said parents might well take an interest in a larger, school-level version of the data, which the center added in late September.
So many factors are in play, Goldhaber said hes cautious about “drawing strong conclusions” from data in the tool alone.
“This gives people more information than they had, and it kind of gives you a clue, if youre going to focus in and say, ‘Where are the places that do look like theyre beating the odds? It gives you some way of figuring out where to look — a really rough measure of whos beating the curve.”
He said the idea came from working with a similar program created by the Professional Educator Standards Board. He said the Center for Education Data & Research will continue to add new data to the program as it becomes available.
Goldhaber said the centers website has been getting visited by 50 to 100 people a day, with most going directly to this tool. Several school principals have contacted him asking about the program, he said, “and there are also people from around the country who have contacted me saying, ‘Wed love to have a tool like this in our state.”
