Virginia's Longitudinal Systems Expansion Project

The Virginia Department of Education proposes to use this grant opportunity to leverage our existing accomplishments in building a longitudinal data system by requesting resources that will take us to the "next level" for both policy-makers and instructional decision makers. Specifically, we wish to support instructional decision-making by delivering building-level data as well as state assessment data to teachers and administrators with an easy-to-use interface. We wish to reduce burden and support Virginia's P-16 effort by developing the capability to exchange student records electronically between K–12 schools, and between K–12 schools and institutions of higher education. Finally, we wish to improve the quality of the data delivered to decision-makers by providing role based training on responsibilities and accountability for good educational data.

The VDOE is entering the fourth year of development of its Student Information Program; the core of the program is the Educational Information Management System (EIMS). The EIMS is Virginia's solution to meeting the data collection and reporting requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, leveraging the data requirements to provide rich decision support tools to Virginia school district personnel. Accomplishments to-date include institutionalizing the assignment of a unique identifier to each student, integrating multiple reporting requirements into a single state student record collection, and a data warehouse accessible to district personnel that contains six years of state assessment data with the ability disaggregate overall and sub-strand results to the teacher and student levels.

The VDOE proposes to add two products from Triand Incorporated, easyCONNECT and easySTUDENT to the existing decision support tools provided by the EIMS program. easyCONNECT will provide educators access to local data in addition to the state assessment data already provided via EIMS. easySTUDENT will enable schools to transfer student records from school to school, and ultimately from K–12 to higher education. The VDOE's existing training program will be enhanced by the availability of additional data. To further support school divisions, VDOE proposes to deliver the Data Quality Curriculum materials under development by the National Forum on Education Statistics via a web-based learning management system to school and school division personnel.