Consulting, Services and Solutions Group, Inc.
 
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Consulting, Services and Solutions Group, Inc.
9926 Main Street
Fairfax, VA 22031

(703)385-2008


 
Accountability Software is Our Focus®


SOLAR The Data Mining Option

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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