From the highest level of government down through boards and districts, teachers, parents and students themselves, everyone with a stake in primary and secondary education wants to see good results. They want to know how well schools are delivering education and how they can improve. They want to know why some students fail where others excel.
With IBM Cognos software, boards and districts can start solving the puzzle of success and failure by combining and analyzing their own numbers and asking such questions as:
- Which programs or other factors tend to lead to student success?
- What are the leading indicators of low performance?
- How do assessment results relate to discipline events?
- Does attendance factor into standard test performance?
- How do “high stakes” test results relate to classroom grades?
- Which investments are improving results and how much more can we invest?
Bringing together such data as student results, attendance, discipline incidents, teacher qualifications, program spending and curricula is the first step. An understanding of the relationships among these areas is the holy grail for educators.
In three to five weeks, your organization can begin using IBM Cognos software to:
- Monitor key metrics with a scorecard. Whether your main concern is grade 11 attendance, test results in language immersion or disciplinary actions in your most vulnerable school, you set up your scorecard to follow the metrics most important to your goals. Then you can drill down from a metric to a detailed report.
- Analyze and report on trends across diverse areas. The data uniformity in the IBM Cognos system lets you understand trends across complex data sets such as student results, finance and staff training. It lets you communicate your findings in a single report that can meet the needs of multiple users.
- Match your financial resources to your goals. IBM Cognos budgeting and planning software lets you define goals, create models and disseminate strategies. It lets you track the success of programs against funding allocations.
With IBM Cognos software schools can move beyond analyzing test scores to a system that provides:
- Deep insight into student performance and clear profiles—Gain deep insight by viewing the performance of students and groups across multiple testing events. Educational institutions can compare student, school, district or board and national marks, and view and track progress by cohort, teacher, course or program.
- Effective monitoring of attendance and interventions—Analyze patterns in individuals, classes, schools or districts and take immediate remedial action to address problems before they become serious.
- Faster compliance reporting—Report on student performance at the department of education or national level by demographic slices such as gender, economic status or language proficiency.
- Actionable teacher development data—See how teachers are performing in relation to their peers within the school, the district or board, the county, province or state, or nationwide to create better professional development programs.
Additional benefits include deep insight into curriculum performance, monitoring exceptions, standardized testing and much more to position schools, boards and students to really make the grade.
