Automate with NAEP -Optimal participates as panelists and exhibitor at DC STAT conference

Date: June 17, 2019
Location: College Park, MD

Optimal Solutions Group will present and have an exhibitor booth at the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Data Conference (DC-STAT) from July 24-26.

Billed as the premiere gathering event for professionals in the data collection and education statistics industry, the theme of the conference is “providing evidence to drive education” and will focus on innovative research and policy at the federal, state, and local levels.

“We’ve been reinventing our value-add to the NCES over the years in our support of creating actionable and timely data analysis. We started off with large paper briefing books and now we have apps and report builders that enable rapid-response reporting” says, Optimal’s CEO, Dr. Mark Turner.

Since 2016, Optimal has participated in the annual event by showcasing innovative ways of analyzing and reporting National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) data in conjunction with other data sources. This is a joint effort between Optimal’s Education Research Center) and Optimal Analytics. This year, the teams will present on using the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) API for reporting results and contextualizing NAEP results with policy relevant visualizations. Optimal will also have an exhibitor booth to demonstrate some of the reporting and visualization tools it has recently created for NCES and other agencies. Participants can drop by Optimal’s booth to learn about and use some of these tools.

“Effective education policy has always depended on data,” says Dr. Brian Cramer. “But the shift towards big data and faster decision-making has provided Optimal with the opportunity to use its real-time framework for developing tools that link data from various sources and produce customizable reporting for contextualizing NAEP results.”
Over the years, Optimal’s Education Statistical Support Network Team (Task #15/ Assessment Division Support Task) has been proactive and forward thinking in developing web-based tools for NCES to help them automate National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reports, create customizable NAEP reports, and link NAEP data with state education data. The linkage allows NCES to contextualize the NAEP results and identify

potentially important relationships between the data.
“Our analytics team started in 2009, and we’ve become advanced in integrating and developing tools in order to tell a data story in user- friendly formats” indicates, Optimal’s Analytics Director, Tracye Turner.

The 2019 NCES DC-STATS Data Conference is an opportunity for professional networking, updates on federal and national activities affecting data collection and reporting, and information about the best new approaches in using education statistics. There will also be a range of sessions targeted toward interests in CCD, data collection, data linking beyond K-12 and data management.