As part of its drive to boost graduation rates, Compass for Success wanted to give teachers a deeper understanding of their students’ needs and abilities, and enable them to offer better support.

Compass for Success worked with KPI and other IBM partner organizations to enhance its powerful analytics platform that gives teachers unprecedented insight into each and every student’s experience.

The reasons for staying in school are clear: high school dropouts typically find it harder to gain employment, earn less, and report a lower quality of life than graduates. Around 8.5 percent of young people in Canada do not get their high school diploma[1]—something that Compass for Success is determined to change.

Diane Findlay, Manager at Compass for Success, begins: “When people think about graduation and dropout rates, they tend to focus purely on those high school years and forget about the elementary school experience. But education is a continuum, and the progress that a child makes during grades one to three in particular has a huge impact on whether or not they graduate from high school.”

For example, studies have shown that 16 percent of children who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade fail to graduate on time.[2] To increase graduation rates and improve student outcomes, Compass for Success wanted to give schools—both elementary and secondary—deeper insight into students’ experiences.

Diane Findlay explains: “Because teachers usually only see their students during class, they have no idea how those kids are performing in other classes, let alone what is going on at home. We have seen instances of students going through serious personal and family issues—which affect everything from attendance to concentration and behavior in class—and the school didn’t have a way to identify the problem. If teachers aren’t able to work together and pick up on clues about why a child starts behaving unusually, or offer adequate support, students’ performance is likely to suffer.

“As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. It’s not just about their grades and report cards, but what goes on at home, too. We wanted to enable schools to better identify students who are at risk, for whatever reason, of being left behind, so that teachers can step in and take action to stop them from falling through the cracks.”

Today, Compass for Success hosts a centralized data warehouse in Toronto and delivers analytics services to school boards across the province via the cloud.

Diane Findlay comments: “We worked very closely with IBM to build the data warehouse, ETL tools, data models and reports, which enable us to provide a comprehensive, powerful analytics solution to schools in just six to eight weeks. Previously, it would have taken several years of hard work and, critically, a lot of funding for a school board to dip its toe into student data analytics. Only around 30 percent of school boards can afford to employ their own data scientist, for example. But equipped with IBM technology, we can deliver affordable, accessible analytics services to any school board and help support all Ontario students.”

By providing teachers with deep, data-driven insight into student performance and behavior, Compass for Success hopes to help schools increase graduation rates and improve student outcomes.

“Traditionally, teachers had to rely on gut feeling to spot students at risk of falling behind their classmates,” says Diane Findlay. “Now, they can identify at-risk students based on solid evidence and take preventative action accordingly. With Watson Analytics, elementary schools can begin to predict which students in grade three—those who really struggle with reading, for example—aren’t expected to graduate from high school. This insight means that teachers can intervene at an earlier age and potentially turn students’ lives around.”

She concludes: “With IBM Analytics, we’re enabling schools to identify, engage and support struggling students better than ever before, helping to ensure that the kids go on to earn their high school diploma and make the most of their education.”

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/high-school-dropout-rates-plummet-1.949996

Compass for Success (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a collaboration of 35 school boards and 22 First Nation communities across the Canadian province of Ontario. The organization provides centralized data warehousing and analytics services that help schools to monitor student performance and improve achievement. The Compass for Success software solution brings relevant and timely data to teachers and education administrators to guide their work, improve student outcomes and help kids to succeed.