A partnership between the City of Nashville and the Metro Nashville Public School System is seeing data analytics help improve reading scores for participants in an afterschool program, according to Ed Tech: Focus on K-12.
Using data on attendance and test scores, the analytics system allows participants to receive custom support distributed by individuals’ reading levels.
The program mirrors the success of similar initiatives in Grand Rapids, MI, and the Fresno Unified School District in California, which have also used big data to improve student engagement and attendance.
Data sharing incorporates a certain measure of cost-saving ability that lawmakers and superintendents, under usual circumstances, would be eager to embrace. But the biggest challenge for most school districts is ensuring that parents are comfortable with data being shared, and how it is preserved to avoid potential hacking or release to non-district related individuals or companies.
Much in the way that higher education uses analytics to assess students’ learning patterns, habits and preferences as a means of college completion, school districts can promote similar technology as a tool for high school success and college access. This also can serve as an equalizer for students from a growing variety of socio-economic backgrounds and challenges in learning levels or language barriers.