What a wonderful world teachers, administrators, and counselors would be living in if they could – in a matter of minutes – easily track the local, state, and national test scores of their entire student body.
What if a middle school principal wanted to use data of test score trends that could introduce some new math curriculum based on all the ACT scores of 10th graders in the district the previous five years? Or a high school counselor wanted to track the state’s science and technology scores of incoming freshmen to help make scheduling suggestions?
This panacea world of user-friendly speed and accuracy is now available to school districts utilizing PowerSchool for its Student Information System (SIS).
PowerSchool Premium Partner Level Data has introduced yet another RealTime Report (RTR) to its lengthy list of platforms that are quick – we’re talking less than 5 minutes folks – aimed at the easiest way to pull information out of PowerSchool that’s super user-friendly, super-fast, super easy – in ways that have never been accomplished before.
“This system gives the districts a much simpler way of accessing the data, filtering it, and exporting it out very quickly..."
It’s called Test Scores RTR and is just one of nearly two dozen RealTime Reports that school districts can utilize with Level Data’s customer-focused software.
The vast majority of PowerSchool users nationwide only pull test scores out of individual student files to place on each graduating seniors’ final transcript. But the worthiness of those test score numbers are so much more valuable than storing for transcripts and can lead to the examination of how schools can potentially do better at serving their students in the classroom long before sending seniors out the door.
A school district can use this Test Scores RTR for as little as tracking SAT or ACT scores, or with Level Data they can go a lot deeper and granular. Even elementary schools can track and utilize the data district-wide on basic standardized testing scores, and the like, to examine future curriculum needs as just one example.
Test scores are relatively easy to import into PowerSchool. However, retrieving test score data for review and analysis is far more difficult. The Test Score Report allows everyday users to retrieve, filter, and export test scores in a simple straightforward way that does not require the user to learn any complex table joins or Data Access Tags.
Lisa Cahall is a former classroom teacher, district technology specialist, and school principal. She now helps school districts nationwide better manage all the PowerSchool data from a position of having been in their shoes.
“This system gives the districts a much simpler way of accessing the data, filtering it, and exporting it out very quickly,” Cahall said. “If we wanted a list of all the ACT math scores for the 10th graders, there is not an easy way to do that with the PowerSchool tables. But with Level Data’s simple filtering, an administrator can get the data they want, and then our export feature puts it in an easy file.
“Looking at the records of just one student at a time, that’s not a hard thing to do in PowerSchool. You can easily access it on one screen. But if a principal came by and said I’d like to see all the SAT science scores for a certain grade and date range, that’s not easy to get out of the PowerSchool interface; you’d have to do that through the tables. Hours upon hours would be spent having someone write a specific report to extract that data out of multiple tables. So, we’ve done that for the school district end-users and brought all that data into one report.”
Easy, accurate, and in the long run more beneficial to students.