Individualized Interventions: Using Data to Think About Student Learning

Schools have many measurements of success at their disposal—school attendance, class grades, and school-wide assessments, for example.  These measurements are critical for schools like the High School for Excellence and Innovation (HSEI), whose mission is predicated on student improvement. Located at the northern tip of Manhattan, HSEI is a transfer school designed for students who have been held back twice in elementary and middle school. In designing a system for measuring student improvement, founding Principal Tyona Washington notes, “We wanted to look for patterns and strengthen what we do for positive student outcomes.” She reached out to Eskolta to help identify meaningful correlations in the data that would measure student improvement without making assumptions about how different assessments were related and interrelated.

To make the data digestible, Eskolta presented a clear, visual representation of student assessments that not only highlighted aggregate trends, but also presented graphs alongside individual student names to help make the information feel useful and real to the school staff. Eskolta’s presentation quantified the difficulties many schools know instinctively—that there is not a clean-cut, direct relationship between high grades and high scores on assessments. In fact, while there was a 20% correlation between student ELA grades and literacy assessment results, there was a near 80% correlation between the same grades and attendance—suggesting that grades might tell more about attendance and behavior than skill development. Additionally, Eskolta’s analysis showed that students demonstrated greater mastery of reading fluency than reading comprehension. In view of this finding, school staff opted to place more explicit emphasis in all courses on the skill of making inferences.

Eskolta’s quantitative research set the groundwork for productive action. Principal Washington affirms, “the data Eskolta tracked informed grouping our students for targeted interventions. Online programs and research-based reading intervention programs were used to help accelerate student’s literacy levels.” She notes, “the project was eye-opening as we needed expertise in how to introduce data in an effective way. [Eskolta] had an approach that allowed staff to be honest about their struggles with this unique population.” By highlighting key trends in the data and translating this analysis into action, Eskolta helped HSEI meet its goal of effectuating student improvement.