Data warehousing

Demographics: Attendance records. Grades. Standardized test scores. Special education needs. Medical concerns.

Clearly this data provides districts and states with important information on individual students, classrooms, and schools that can enable effective decision making for better teaching and learning. However, when multiplying this data by the numbers of students and adding in the complexity of student mobility rates, meaningful use of the data becomes a real challenge.

Educators find collecting and managing data, much of it residing in a variety of filing and computer systems, time-consuming and difficult. Without the right information delivered in a timely manner, school-based decision making cannot be effective. A lack of information also prevents the development of an accountability system that holds teachers and administrators responsible for student performance.

TIMMS provides a way to collect a structured set of data based on assessments and grades aligned to the learning benchmarks directly from the classroom without extra teacher work. This is, in effect, the metadata that is stored in the data warehouse, allowing for reports and ad hoc analysis from individual student to district or even state-wide data sets.