Need to update your district leaders or board on how your school is performing? Schoolzilla is a great tool to analyze your data to find answers to key questions that your leaders want to know about your school!
Boards or district leadership often want to hear highlights, major reasons for the results, and plans moving forward. It requires a lot of work to get this clear picture though! Here are some tips on how to use Schoolzilla to analyze your data to find key data points and synthesize your take-aways and plan to present to leadership.
Analyze Your Data on Key Performance Areas
How To: Find Strengths and Growth Areas for This School Year
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Are you meeting your goal? Use the coloring and goal information on the main tile view to assess if you're meeting your goal or distance from goal. If you have not yet set goals in Schoolzilla, have your district's Schoolzilla administrator set them. You can find the steps in this article.
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Which subgroups are performing better or worse? Click horizontal bar icon to see results by different demographic groups. Hover over a bar to see number of students included in that subgroup; be careful with your conclusions if small number of students.
- Be sure to review results by for the demographic breakdowns that matter the most for your school or district (e.g., priority areas, areas where you've struggled before, etc.).
- Be sure to review results by for the demographic breakdowns that matter the most for your school or district (e.g., priority areas, areas where you've struggled before, etc.).
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How has performance changed this year? Use the line graph icon to see how performance has been progressing this year. This is particular useful for attendance metrics and formative assessments that are given multiple times throughout the year.
How to Identify Trends Over Time
- How does performance compare to past years? Use Metric Zoom icon to analyze results by subgroups or grade over time. Use COMPARE BY to see results over time for different subgroups (e.g., Primary Ethnicity). In particular, it's helpful to analyze by subgroups that are focus areas or ones that are below goal to see if there has been improvement.
- This step can take time. Don't get overwhelmed! Jot down notes to keep track of key data findings you want to share (see below for a slide template to organize your thoughts).
How To: Dig Deeper on Assessments
- For your assessment results, you'll likely want to dig into strand-level results or results for a particular subgroups over time. Metric Zoom provides lots of flexibility to cut the data many different ways.
- A: Is there a particular content area students are struggling in? Choose content (A below) - Strand to identify which strands were higher performing or saw improvement and which ones need focus.
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B: How did a particular subgroup perform over time? Choose the relevant demographic group in the FILTER BY section (B below) (e.g., African Americans or English Learners).
C: How did different subgroups perform over time overall or on a particular strand? Use COMPARE BY (C below) to choose the subgroup of interest (e.g., primary ethnicity or grade level at the time) to see results by group.
Synthesize Key Take-Aways
- Review your findings to identify the most important ones. Think about which ones best related to your district or school priorities, which ones surprised you, which ones resonated because you had been working purposefully one them, etc.
- Create a slide deck: Here is a slide deck template (also available for download below) to help you synthesize and present your take-aways.
- For your presentation, we recommend actually using Schoolzilla to show your board/cabinet your data. However we recognize this may not be feasible and the slide deck template offers options for how best to include data in your presentation as an alternative.