Groton Schools Will Use New Data System To Flag Struggling Students

The company that created the reporting system for the Connecticut Mastery Test is working with Groton Public Schools to develop a new data system that combines standardized testing data with school records to track the progress of specific children and flag problems early.

The school department has worked for the last year and a half with Texas-based eMetric, the same group that set up the system for the Connecticut Mastery Test and Connecticut Academic Performance Test, as well as the assessment systems in several other states.

The company is developing a program called Sigma, which merges the data of students’ scores on standardized tests with their school data records like attendance, discipline, excused and unexcused absences and grades. The system was ready at the end of June, and Groton will begin using it for the first time this fall. Further advances are in the works.

In its current state, it can be used to look at broad correlations, such as whether unexcused absences affect math scores (the answer is no) and whether students in a particular class are falling below the norm.

Teachers would have access to the system and could program it to target specific areas. For example, a teacher could tell the system to track the attendance of every student in a class, and flag those students whose attendance drops below a certain threshold.

“It reaches out and says, ‘Hey, look at this kid,’” Groton School Superintendent Paul Kadri said. “Think about this at the high school, where the kid goes to multiple teachers. You could now see if the kid is having problems in all their classes. This is an early warning system.”

Lindsey Stringer, eMetric’s project manger of Sigma, said the company is working on a further advance that would hold data on the typical performance of specific children, then flag those students if they perform outside their norm.

For example, if a child normally earned Bs and then began getting Cs in multiple classes, staff could be notified. That capability is not yet available but is being worked on, Stringer said.

 “Teachers can set up these thresholds to tell them about any student that goes below a certain cut off point,” Stringer said. “The next version will tell users if a student is performing abnormally based on (that) students track record.”

She said the company chose Groton for the pilot because Kadri approached them during a conference in Fairfield and expressed interest in it.

“We really believe that this is where the future of using data in school districts is going to go,” Stringer said.  “A lot of districts have different data systems that don’t talk to each other. Like special education is in one system, and assessment is another data system . . .We see (this) as a solution for all districts.”