In terms of the FERPA/HIPAA information much of this is simplified at the elementary level. A lot of this information becomes more important to children and parents at secondary and post secondary level when you are looking at things that may or may not affect the student in apply for college or job skills opportunities. Having had five children go through the educational system I have only had to get involved with there student records once. We don't have a lot of demands to see MEAP records on a third grader, but it was good to get this information and add it to my knowledge base on education.
Data Collection in Education
Now, honestly we have looked at similar numbers like this before and our whole school knows that within our school population this has been a ongoing problem. With the downturn in the economy over the last five years, the problem has only gotten worse!
A couple of things come to mind when looking at this information. First, you have to remember that if you are looking at five years of data on third grade testing you need to remember that these are not the same children year to year. So if you want data to see how individual grade levels of children are doing you need to look at the same group for grade three, four, five, etc and compare "apples to apples". The second thing that comes to mind is that this is only one piece of data comparing children based on economics and qualifications for this subgroup which is free and reduced lunch. This give you only a small piece of information to work with. Then you need to look at facts that might not be in the data like initiating a new mathematics curriculum for the first year, class size, other external factors that might affect the data like weather, mid year staff changes, for example. In addition, to get deeper into the heart of the data you need to break down the testing and look at the actual questions, the vocabulary and trends. What were our children strongest in, what were their weakest areas, how does our curriculum relate to these strengths and weaknesses, and then ask yourself. "How or what do we need to implement to improve our children's knowledge base in mathematics?"
Survey on Socrative
Questions, Surveys, and Polls
What do our demographics (gender, race, ESL) look like and compare the scores to the average on the third grade MEAP in mathematics. What areas do we need to strengthen? How will be chart our data?
How did our students perform related to state, district and surrounding communities on the third grade MEAP in mathematics? How can we improve our scores using the new Engage New York curriculum?
What procedures or systems can we implement to help improve our student's scores based on data from the MEAP scores?
What is working? What is not? How can we address our needs in the classroom?
We already do mini surveys with our parents during parent teacher conferences but we could use technology to help reach parents that cannot make conferences or miss the survey and Dennis would not need to sit down with 400 pieces of paper and tally all the answers!