Case :

Improving schools in Oman has become an increasingly urgent mission for the country. Actually achieving that improvement is a difficult task. One approach gaining its way is more intensive use of information systems to measure educational performance at the individual and school level and identify problem areas requiring additional resources. The 8000-student Zahra Public school in Oman is pushing for data-driven DSS in schools. Forty employees at the school Office of Shared Accountability generate reports on how many students take algebra in middle school or read below grade level. The information system identified students who required additional support from teachers and parents.

The administrators initiated a plan to create a data collection system for test scores, grades, and other data useful for identifying students with problems and speeding up interventions to improve their learning and educational performance.

Principals access and analyze student performance data to help make decisions over the course of the year, as opposed to only when annual test data arrives. This way, teachers can meet the needs of students who require additional instruction or other types of attention before they fall behind. In the past the school had paper based data management by now the marks and grades of the students are entered using a particular information system which enabled the real-time access of all these to various stake holders. This facilitated the individual student performance monitoring across various courses easy. There was provision for the kindergarten students also the system enabled teachers to identify difficult words to the students. There were pronunciation checking devices that helped the teachers to identify the way of pronunciation of the kids. Also, when students begin to move away from their normal academic patterns, like getting bad grades, the system sends alerts to parents and school administrators. The trend changes of grades made the parents and teachers to take appropriate decision on a particular student. There were provisions for advanced learner strategies in the system which enabled the teachers to identify best students in the school. The results are very impressive.

Some parents and educators complain about the amount and frequency of tests, suggesting that children should be spending more time on projects and creative tasks. But practical alternative strategies to encourage improvement in struggling schools are difficult to develop. The system focused on teachers performance also. School teachers have been enrolled in a similar program that identifies struggling teachers and supplies data to help them improve. The underperforming teachers were identified using the data and problem areas were identified to improve their performance. The number of terminations in the school went drastically down after the data driven approach.

Not all teachers have liked the data-driven approach. The Education Association, the countys main teachers union, estimates that keeping a running record of student results on reading assessments and other testing add about three to four hours to teachers weekly workloads.

Answer the following questions:

3a. Examine the importance of this information system to the students. (5 Marks)

3b. Imagine you are the principal of a school in Oman. How do you think the above mentioned systems will add value to the following processes in your school.? (5 Marks)

1. Teacher evaluation
2. Student evaluation