Demonstration of Dashboard Tools at 2011 National Forum on Education Statistics

Date: June 28, 2011
Location: College Park, MD

The National Forum on Education Statistics will hold its annual conference July 25-27 in Washington, DC. The conference focuses on “improving education data through best-practice guides on crime, violence, and discipline incident data, data use, education privacy, and Section 508 Accessibility.” Optimal Solutions Group, LLC (Optimal) has been accepted for vendor demonstration.

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has adopted an education data dashboard in an attempt to answer public concerns on issues of transparency and results in the U.S. education system. Optimal seeks to assist the ED through its development of two different real-time dashboards. The first focuses on monitoring a hypothetical grant program and shows how the dashboard is capable of indentifying grantee compliance and performance trends and gaps. The second dashboard maximizes effectiveness and efficiency in conducting systematic reviews for meta-analysis. This dashboard also serves the functions of coding literature and reporting results, reducing burdens and biases, and enforcing a coding scheme.

Both dashboards will provide visualization of results, improved quality assurance, status updates, and trend and gap identification. Together, these tools will foster collaboration among researchers by allowing more systematic comparisons across vast volumes of research. This will ensure full transparency of money spent by the ED by allowing anyone to monitor how grant money is spent.