TDOE Research & Evaluation Performance Task

Scenario: A Principal’s Academy to Improve College-Going and College-Readiness

Superintendent Jeff Wiggins joined the School District of San Metropolis (SDSM) in February 2012. SDSM is located in a moderately-sized city in the South East and enrolls approximately 38,000 students in 73 schools (40 elementary schools, 20 middle schools, and 13 high schools). Though the district demonstrates success with on-time high school graduation rates, a good percentage of graduates do not enroll in college.

Wiggins is keen on improving college readiness for all youths and increasing the rate of college enrollment among graduates. The community is equally passionate about improving its students’ postsecondary success. For many of these students, college is not seen as a viable option. Wiggins believes that the district can improve college readiness among all SDSM students by first identifying high schools to serve as “models of success” and then learning from these models about best practices for producing “college ready” students who enroll and persist in college. Therefore, Wiggins has asked you to examine available data and report out on which school you would recommend as the first site.

He would like to receive a short memo that outlines your selection and justification, accompanied by a visual display that he can share with additional stakeholders to tell the story of why your selection was chosen as the first site. He leaves it to you to decide on the appropriate selection criteria and mentions that it seems important to include the high school’s current college outcomes in the decision process.

Using the accompanying real-world, uncleaned (fictitious) data and codebook, complete the following tasks:

Create a short memo and visual representation of your recommendations Create a short memo (1 page) justifying to your selection to Superintendent Wiggins, who is not trained in research methods. For Supt. Wiggins’ analysts, include a brief (<2 page) technical appendix explaining any methodological decisions made (which would include any assumptions about the data elements or data quality, as needed). Create a visual representation that supports your selection. The visual displays should clearly show the indicators that you choose to drive your school selection.

Memo and visual representation of your recommendations Your working documents for the task: The returned spreadsheet (if any modifications were made) The code used in answering this question, explicitly naming the relevant statistical or programming languages used to execute the code (if code was created in this exercise). Identify any other software used not captured above. You may annotate the spreadsheet and/or code to help evaluators, but this is not a requirement of the task.