International Data Evaluation Center

Web Based Data Collection

Reading Recovery Teachers and Teacher Leaders enter data using IDEC’s secure data collection web site. Each user is given a unique username and password which links them to the data they are entering. The web site uses SSL encryption to protect data as it is being transmitted over internet.

Data Validation

IDEC uses two types of validation to ensure the accuracy of data being entered. This first type is computer-based validation. Each of our data entry pages have a set computer validations that check for improper dates, numbers that are out of a specified range, text entries that must be a specific length or follow certain formatting rules and more. Our pages also have conditional logic programmed into them that will enable/disable items based on the data entered by users.

The next type of validation is human-based validation. Our web site has data submission/approval system built into it that allows teachers to enter data then submit it to their teacher leaders for review and approval. Teachers Leaders can look at the data and ask “Do the data make sense?”, something that computers aren’t so good at doing. Employing these two tactics helps ensure data are clean, reliable, and consistent from year-to-year.

Registry System

The foundation of our data collection systems is our Registry System. This system keeps track of all the people and organizations participating in Reading Recovery and how they are related to each other. Every other system IDEC uses the Registry System to determine things like:

-Does a school belong to a school district?
-Retrieve a list teachers that work in a school district.
-Return a list of students that were served at a particular school.

Survey System

This system allows IDEC to create and deploy surveys to our web site in rapid fashion. A survey is defined as a list of one or more questions, with each question having the option of having predefined responses for it. The IDEC team uses an internal web site to design surveys, attached validations to questions, and insert conditional logic that responds to data entered by users. Surveys can be updated in real-time as corrections are needed.

Volume Reporting System

The last, and most impressive, piece of IDEC's data proessing arsenal is our High-Volume Reporting System. The Reporting System allows IDEC to automatically run 10,000+ reports every summer for our Reading Recovery colleagues. The Reporting System excels are producing “cookie-cutter” reports, reports that all have the same layout and format. For example, each school participating in Reading Recovery receives an annual report at the end of the school year. When a request for a school report gets inserted into the queue, the reporting system loads up the generic school report template but then inserts data just for that school into the report. The reporting system will also go through and update the report title so that it has the school’s name it and will even save it to its own directory on our file server. The reporting system also has the capability our creating data dumps. These are Excel spreadsheets that contain all the data entered by teachers throughout the school year.