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What is school or
district data mining?
Data mining enables you to discover hidden patterns and relationships in
large amounts of student, instructional personnel, curriculum and
diagnostic benchmark test
data. Data mining solves a common paradox: the more student, curriculum
and test data you have, the more difficult and time-consuming it is to
effectively analyze and draw meaning from it. What should be a data gold
mine often lies unexplored, due to a lack of personnel, time or
expertise. Data mining uses powerful analytic technologies to quickly
and thoroughly explore mountains of student, curriculum, and test data,
isolating the valuable, usable information — the school and district
intelligence — that you require to ensure no child is left behind.
Why use school or
school system data mining?
When you have a reliable guide to the future of your school or school
system, you have the power to make the right decisions today. Data
mining empowers you to change the future of your school or school
system, by delivering accurate predictions. For example, data mining
tells you which students are likely to earn a minimum of a “C” in all
core classes and pass standardized testing by standards of learning
content area, and which are most likely to improve with certain
instructional delivery and/or
curriculum. With this view of the future, you increase your return on
education budget dollars by focusing key teacher and school system resources and/or
curriculum on those students skill/knowledge gap areas likely to benefit the most from the
resource allocation realignment, and focus to assure no child is left
behind. Your decisions are based on sound intelligence, not on instinct
or gut reactions. And those decisions deliver more consistent results
that keep you ahead of other schools, school systems and the guidelines
dictated by the federal and state department of education.
There are two main kinds of models in data mining: predictive and
descriptive. Predictive models can be used to forecast explicit
values, based on patterns determined from known results. For example,
from a database of students who have already undertaken a particular
SOLAR diagnostic benchmark, a model can be built that
predicts which students from which school and classroom (teacher) are
likeliest to succeed on the actual Standards of Learning test(s). Descriptive models describe
patterns in existing data, and are generally used to create meaningful
subgroups such as student demographic clusters and instructional
leader/teacher clusters.
How Do We Begin…
The Consulting, Services and Solutions
Group, Inc. SOLAR Data Mining Team can assist you in determining the
feasibility of a data mining project, in proof-of-concept development,
and by working with your staff to integrate school or school district
data mining into your day-to-day education system operations.
The
Data Mining team assigned to your school or school district will assist
you with
·
Refining your data mining requirements;
·
Putting in place the proper standards and procedures to ensure
consistent data
gathering across all of the schools in the
district;
·
Developing the data gathering and analysis algorithms to gather and
analyze the
desired information
·
Implementing reporting procedures and tools to summarize and output the
data in
formats that meet the needs of the school
district.
When you secure the data mining
services of Consulting, Services and Solutions Group, Inc. a project
manager is assigned to oversee the delivery of those services. This
assignment is a critical success factor for any engagement. We do not
bill our clients for the project management services undertaken for the
data mining engagement, the responsibility of the project management
staff is to ensure success by managing the engagement. You are only
billed for the services of the team member(s) implementing and
completing the tasks associated with the actual data mining engagement.
For additional information regarding our data mining services send an
email inquiry to
info@cssg.com
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