Increasing Intervention Efficacy Using Data Dashboards

San Ramon Valley USD

Overview

San Ramon Valley Unified School District (SRVUSD) abounds with opportunities to enhance its capacity to make data-informed decisions. It balances a population of students who navigate school well. These students go on to graduate into highly ranked universities preparing them for future careers. However, there are segments of the district’s student population who encounter persistent challenges as they progress through the educational system.   

While SRVUSD could previously accurately and efficiently seek out and visualize data sets of these students across predictable multiple measures, the district faced challenges in effectively sorting data into individual student profiles and student groups. Such data was confined to cumbersome spreadsheets manipulated and produced by its department to be shared with and sorted by local administrators, liaisons, and teaching teams. The district adopted a uniquely built customizable platform for disaggregating data in highly flexible, efficient, and varied ways yielding profile data that can quickly be used to track progress, monitor interventions, and clearly delineate desired outcomes.

Determining the Need

SRVUSD’s first step was to empower liaisons as super-users to guide implementation. Liaisons are “Teachers on Special Assignment” fully released from the classroom and positioned at each school across the district. Prior to implementing its data dashboard, SRVUSD met with the Liaisons to garner feedback regarding what elements the team would prefer to see incorporated into our dashboard. SRVUSD brought a sandbox platform to demonstrate the dashboard. The district also conducted a needs survey. The Liaisons sought comprehensive insights into student performance, leveraging existing resources to yield actionable results for student interventions. Transparency of data among all staff members involved in student improvement initiatives was crucial, with particular attention to subgroup performance. Special focus needed to be shone on subgroup performance while providing the tools necessary to disaggregate the data.

This document contains the questions asked in the needs assessment.

Building Data Capacity and Fluency

Once SRUVSD was ready for implementation, the district began with an overview of the system and trained users on how to create data walls with student tagging. This allowed teams to set filtering based on any assessment or group of assessments by customizable demographic groups. They hoped to ensure the ability to track students at risk by providing a comprehensive overview of students at a glance. 

Further, the district enabled cross-comparison of data based on achievement, social emotional learning, and other factors such as behavior. Data walls coupled with tagging systems in order to effectively filter assessment data across populations of students identified within its Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) Framework was highly effective in providing a variety of access to their team members. These efforts contributed to streamlining data analysis, intervention strategies, ultimately improving outcomes for all students.

Implementing Intervention Tracking

Further, the district began developing a centralized system for intervention tracking that was critical to the development of its dashboard. Individuals and groups of students received customized intervention plans that met their specific needs for personalized support. Intervention cycles on the dashboard featured attendance tracking, specific Tier II and Tier III supports, 4-6 assessment cycles, and a pre- and post-score at the beginning and end of the intervention cycle. Additionally, SRVUSD incorporated data analysis and reporting features to identify trends and patterns in student progress. The district facilitated effective communication and collaboration between teachers and support staff on the platform. This improved the overall efficacy of the MTSS framework and improved outcomes for its students.

Lessons Learned

SRVUSD’s implementation process was relatively successful and outcomes aligned to its original goals. In a system as large as theirs, they gained tremendous insight into the degree of fluency necessary amongst our targeted population to arrive at positive outcomes. Setting aside the platform, simply evaluating the skill sets of its team with regard to the use of technology caused them to quickly pivot and offer scaffolds to support access to and navigation on our dashboard that they did not first consider prior to training.

The district also underestimated the need to partition its training amongst elementary and secondary Liaisons. The needs were vastly different between these two populations, as were the access to data sets they preferred when making decisions about intervention in our MTSS Framework.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, SRUVSD has a tremendous amount of work left to do in the area of progress monitoring.  Prior to the implementation of its dashboard, their team was using a wide variety of teaching strategies and data sets to monitor intervention.  When the district provided the initial training for intervention tracking on its dashboard, they were able to narrow strategies and data sets, but work is still necessary across our MTSS Framework.

Additional Resources

Kit Bragg

Director of Assessment, Research,
and Evaluation

Ramaa Ravi

Educational Services Technical Analyst