Description:

Product Video Demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV-hDQqpKcc

Purpose: With the No Child Left Behind legislation, schools are under increasing demand to back decisions with evidence. Educators are expected to make decisions using evidence and are responsible for results. Ideally, decisions are based on scientific research, yet most principals lack the facilities or staff to carry out rigorous studies or to interpret the data gathered over the school year. Data warehouses often include raw data but these warehouses often lack sufficient analytical capacity and assistance in setting up and evaluating the outcomes of experiments, especially for decision-makers at the building level. Empirical Education's current tool, MeasureResults^TM, is designed to assist administrators, by building the appropriate design and analytical techniques into a simple framework incorporating a web-based interface, automatically generated reports, and technical support that includes expert in-house statistician review of all analyses and reports. The purpose of this project is to enrich this tool to support school principals and administrators in conducting their own "school level quasi-experiments," and to create a new interface for building-level administrators.

Project Activities: Technology development includes adapting the web-based MeasureResults^TM tool for use with quasi-experiments and creating a new interface for use by building-level administrators. In addition, online training will be created to support administrators in designing experiments and working with the MeasureResults^TM data acquisition facilities and user interface. After technological development is complete, the research team will assess the feasibility and usability of the use of the enriched tool in by building-level administrators in schools.

Products: Products will include the enriched MeasureResults^TM tool with adaptations resulting from the research, as well as online training support and user documentation.