What is flo?

Problem Definition

There is a new resource at the disposal of students, teachers, parents, and all stakeholders living and working in the state of Virginia. Virginia now has access to the new Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS). What is the VLDS? "Thanks to a federal grant, Virginia has a way to store and use a vast amount of education data like testing statistics, attendance, dropout rates and post-secondary enrollment figures. The system, known as the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS) is designed to store student information from K-12, through higher education and then into the workforce so that students, parents, educators, policymakers, legislators and even employers can use the information to make decisions that affect students." (http://www.apps4va.org/about.html) The VDOE is trying to address two issues related to the underuse of this wealth of information. One issue is that very few people know about this new resource. The second issue is the database in its current format is not user friendly. Through the venue of a competition, the VDOE is soliciting ways to encourage stakeholders to use the information from the VLDS and use it effectively.

Organizational and Individual Drivers

  1. Provide teachers with an efficient way to access relevant data from the VLDS and use it to quickly access the lesson plans and activities that could benefit their students.
  2. Develop a web-based dashboard user-friendly enough to decrease the frustration and time consuming experience related to the format of the output of the VLDS in its current form.
  3. Develop and enter a working prototype in the Apps4VA competition.

Organizational and Individual Barriers

  1. Time constraints: The group is limited in its time to analyze to the best of abilities due to the competition deadline, which is November 15, 2012 at 5:00 p.m. EST;
  2. Motivation: There is so much potential for the FLO program, but the team must overcome obstacles of time and a busy full-time work and school schedule;
  3. Understanding the link between data, instruction, and learning;
  4. Technical aspects: ensuring proper server space and managing site construction issues;
  5. Reporting: ensuring reports are delivered in a clear, concise manner;
  6. Provide appropriate lesson plans to teachers: correct report assessment and lesson plan delivery.

Recommendations and Rationale of FLO

Within the context of the Apps4 VA competition described above, Dr. Bland, Associate Professor, Division of Educational Psychology, Research Methods, and Education Policy, College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University, proposed the following focus to our design team. Using the Standards of Learner (SOL), Virginia's public school standard testing program, data provided by the VLDS, interested users would select the particular SOL test and a particular population such as county, district or school on which to focus. Once the user's selection was made, FLO would produce a report that showed levels of achievement categorized into performance bands (i.e. Very Low, Low, Moderately Low, Moderately High, High). Each band would then be linked to suggested resources that, if used, could help student improve their academic performance in that particular area.

Considering the requirements for the Apps4VA competition as well as the design ideas of Dr. Bland, our team came up with the design concept of FLO. Our first prototype of FLO is a web-based dashboard that pulls data from the VLDS and presents it to educators in a user -friendly format. FLO links K-12 SOL results to specific learning opportunities for students based on performance bands. FLO helps educators provide Focused Learning Opportunities (FLO) for all students in the Commonwealth.

FLO (Focused Learning Opportunities) Design & Interface Description

FLO will provide users (teachers, parents, researchers, administrators, and other stakeholders) with the capability to obtain lesson plans to help address academic performance improvements for students based on Standard of Learning (SOL) tests. The suggested lesson plans will be accompanied with the academic standards with which they align. More specifically, the design of FLO will put users a few clicks away from understanding the results of standardized test data of every student in Virginia.

FLO allows users the capability of drilling down based on county, district, school, grade, and subject to obtain test results and groups by performance outcomes. Dr. Bland, the faculty member guiding the design and development of the FLO prototype, created the performance groupings. [We should describe these grouping in detail here.Need information from Dr. Bland]

The initial prototype described here will focus on teachers and will provide a specific working example of 3rd grade reading to illustrate the many ways FLO can be used. Figure 1 illustrates the flow of data for FLO.