Math is a critical skill for middle school students’ future success, and ensuring students have access to effective math instruction is essential to their growth. Educators, meanwhile, receive a lot of student data from their schools’ curriculum and learning management systems (LMS), but those data are siloed in separate computer programs, which makes it difficult to use them to help students. 

NORC at the University of Chicago was tasked with building a consortium to address these issues and help improve middle school math outcomes. The Curriculum and Learning Improvement Project (CLIP) Consortium brought together organizations that don’t typically collaborate to build and test a secure, integrated data system that gives teachers real-time insights to support struggling students.

NORC used its research expertise to guide the development of the data ecosystem and evaluate the pilot program. NORC helped define which data elements would be most valuable to integrate, served as intermediaries between technical partners and school districts, and designed and assessed the pilot implementation. 

“We helped consortium members build the system by giving them the information they needed to know how they should best connect it,” said Pratt-Williams. “We used our research knowledge to help create a system that could be useful.”

The consortium ensured that the integrated system would protect data security throughout the pilot period.

NORC provided crucial expertise in developing data use agreements that maintained security while enabling the necessary data integration. Student data remained within its approved environments—the integration simply allowed systems to communicate securely behind the scenes.

“This is very new,” said Pratt-Williams. “The Gates Foundation was willing to fund this because it’s hard. It’s hard to get the data use agreements that you have to set up across all of these different organizations when everyone has proprietary data and systems.”

After two years of research and development, the groundbreaking four-year initiative yielded a month-long pilot with a large Nevada middle school district. NORC surveyed teachers to assess the implementation of the system, which received positive reviews from teachers and school administrators.

The integration created a single view of student data for educators and showed a real-world impact.

Teachers from the school district praised the system for giving them data-driven insights that helped them support struggling students.

“The integrated data system really empowered teachers and district leaders to access the data they needed to support what they knew but couldn’t really prove,” said Pratt-Williams.

For example, the system allowed educators to see correlations between detention attendance and math performance—not just for individual students but across the student population. Teachers said they could now see patterns that were previously only hunches.

With the proof of concept now demonstrated, the consortium is seeking additional school districts for an expanded pilot that would test the integration across multiple school systems simultaneously.

“The concept is simple: Why are teachers logging in and out of more than one system to connect student data? Why can’t those data just live in one place?” says Pratt-Williams. “Everyone in the consortium is committed to doing that.”