Future Ready Learning

than when the calendar indicates there is a testing date. At the same time, we have a responsibility
to ensure that all students are held to high standards and offered excellent educational
experiences. Ensuring equity while also providing accelerated personalization is the one of the
greatest challenges and opportunities moving forward for technology in assessment.
Using Data Effectively and Appropriately
To realize the vision of sharing data across student information systems, we need to address
several challenges. On the technical front, formidable barriers to the development of multi-level
assessment systems are created by having several student data systems running side-by-side,
coupled with disparate data formats and the lack of interoperability across systems. Student and
program data today are collected at various levels and in various amounts to address different
needs in the educational system. State data systems generally provide macro solutions, institution-level
performance management systems offer micro solutions, and student data generated by
embedded assessments create nano solutions. Providing meaningful, actionable information that
is collected across all of these systems will require agreement on the technical format for sharing
data while attending to student privacy and security.
To assist with overcoming these challenges, the National Center for Education Statistics at the
U.S. Department of Education has been leading the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS)
Initiative, a national, collaborative effort to develop voluntary, common data standards. The
CEDS Initiative’s objective is to help state and local education agencies and higher education
organizations work together to identify a minimal set of key data elements common across organizations
and come to agreement on definitions, business rules, and technical specifications to
improve the comparability of and ability to share those elements. (Note: Version 5 was released
in January 2015.)
For more information on protecting student data and privacy, see Section 5: Infrastructure.
Learning Dashboards That Enable Visualizations
Although systems that support real-time feedback can increase educator and learner understanding
of progress toward learning goals, the feedback is even more valuable if it is available in
one easily accessible place. To achieve this, we need to connect information about learning that
happens across digital tools and platforms.
Learning dashboards integrate information from assessments, learning tools, educator observations,
and other sources to provide compelling, comprehensive visual representations of student
progress in real time. A learner’s attendance data, feedback from instructors, summative evaluation
data, and other useful information all can be made available in formats specific to different
stakeholders. Learning dashboards can present this data in easy-to-understand graphic interfaces.
These dashboards also can offer recommendations about resources to help students continue
their learning progression as well as help identify students who may be at risk of going off track
or even dropping out of school. Across larger education systems, these dashboards can help educators
to track learner performance across time as well as monitor groups of students to identify
shifts in equity, opportunity, and achievement gaps. Although teacher dashboards are becoming
commonplace, student and family dashboards can offer promising opportunities to help students
take control of their own learning.
OFFICE OF Educational Technology
60