The First Step in Student Data Tracking. Your District’s Student Information System.
We will be writing more in the next few weeks about the data gathering and tracking of children at school, how it is gathered and where it goes for ‘research’. The first gathering point of student data comes from your school’s Student Information System (SIS). My school district uses Infinite Campus for its data tracking of its students. Here’s a visual of what Infinite Campus (or any other SIS) gathers to gauge ‘student achievement’. From wikipedia:
(click on graphic to enlarge)
A student information system (SIS) is a software application for education establishments to manage student data. Student Information Systems (often abbreviated as SIS systems) provide capabilities for entering student test and other assessment scores, build student schedules, track student attendance, and manage many other student-related data needs in a school.
The SIS is equivalent to an Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP system for a corporate customer. As such, many of the issues with ERP System Selection Methodology, implementation, and operation of an ERP system apply too.
You can see this information includes: assessment, transportation, food services, library data and other data for the school is gathered as well: human resource, finance, special education and‘other’. Does that ‘other’ include assessments as they pertain to attitudes, values and beliefs? Watch these data sets of ‘other’.
As stated above, the SIS is equivalent to an Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP system for a corporate customer. As such, many of the issues with ERP System Selection Methodology, implementation, and operation of an ERP system apply too.
Let’s look at what an ERP System means and as you read the definition, think about how it fits into a school building and the purpose of education and how your child is considered by the system: