Data mining student performance

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February 29, 2000
Web posted at: 8:26 a.m. EST (1326 GMT)

by Ellen Messmer

(IDG) -- A lot of companies use data-mining to comb through databases to figure out which of their products sells best and where. Now a public school district is using equally sophisticated technology to analyze student performance.

Florida's Broward County School District is outfitting each of its 207 schools with an IBM AS/400 running IBM's DB2 so school administrators can record student test scores and absenteeism, and analyze trends using IBM's desktop data-mining tools.

The goal is to give administrators an easy way to get a historical view of each child's academic performance, says Nancy Terrell, director of strategic planning and accounting for the district.

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In addition, officials who want to see how their school performance compares with other county schools can get remote access over a private-line network connecting the schools to the central data repository maintained by the county's Education Technology Service (ETS).

This data repository is also based on the IBM AS/400 running DB2. It is now getting daily student updates based on data input by school administrators during the regular course of their jobs at schools that use the new system.

With a population of 250,000 students, Broward County School District is the fifth-largest in the U.S. By next year, all the Broward student data is expected to be searchable online by authorized school administrators using passwords and IBM's Brio data-mining software for the PC or Macintosh. The county is also considering how to make select parts of the repository's information available on the Web to parents.

"We need to see how a child has done historically on standardized tests over a period of time," Terrell says. "We used to have a great many disparate databases, and it was hard to get that information. We had to go through a large, forbidding printout to do a comparison on how well one class did in comparison with another."

Mindful of privacy concerns, Broward County has taken steps to ensure that the central data repository in the ETS office will only display average scores of schools - not individual student scores - when accessed remotely. "I can't pull up an individual student's scores at school unless it's my own school," Terrell says.

Phyllis Chasser, senior data warehouse analyst for the district, says teachers who use the Brio software are discovering more about student learning patterns.

"One math teacher was very upset because his students were only doing average on math tests," Chasser says. "He went online at our data warehouse and found that a good portion of the students were scoring poorly on building graphics. He was surprised, and changed his teaching to focus more on graphics."

Broward County has been able to implement its data-mining project under a $2 million grant from IBM for "reinventing education" that covers the cost of services but not equipment. Data mining is already showing its value in letting school officials complete in an afternoon the kind of analysis that used to take several days, Terrell says.

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