Request for Information

Student Information System and Interactive Predictive Data Dashboard

Introduction:

The purpose of this request is to seek information and interest around creating a data system that uses predictive analytics and statistical algorithms that can identify the likelihood of future student outcomes based on historical data.

 Background or Project Information:

The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development recently procured a new innovative assessment system, which includes interim assessments as well as a summative assessment. The vendor is working with DEED staff and districts to increase assessment and data literacy through a variety of professional development opportunities. Increasing an awareness of how to use data ensures that educators are using all available data to inform instruction and improve student outcomes.

Scope of Work:

Create a data system that will be used by the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development and districts to examine data in an interactive dashboard. This dashboard will be predictive based on historical data, as well as interface with current data systems and planning tools to provide a full picture of student outcomes as well as potential future outcomes. The system will be able to identify potential areas of risk as well as provide data that will inform state and district policy. The system will also be used to collect data (student information system) and report mandatory reporting categories as outlined in Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, the Coronavirus Response and Relieve Supplemental Appropriations Act, and the American Rescue Plan Act.

Deliverables:

Overview:  Create a data system:

• An Interactive Data Dashboard that includes current demographic and assessment data, data from ESSA, CARES Act, CRRSA Act, and ARP Act to comply with mandatory reporting requirements.

• Create predictive analytics based on historical data to provide potential future student outcomes.

• Work with current data systems and staff to create a seamless reporting dashboard

• Provide support/maintenance after the system is created to ensure sustainability of the dashboard

• Act as a student information system to collect all mandatory demographic and academic data related to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as amended by Every Student Succeeds Act and the components required for all federal reporting. 

Predictive Data Dashboard Specific Elements:

Growth Model Requirements

1. Provide growth measures at the district, school, classroom, and student subgroup level.
2. Include all available prior standardized assessment data that meet inclusion criteria across grades, subjects, and state assessments.
3. Include students with missing assessment data.
4. Focus on whether, on average, the students fell below, met, or exceed the state’s expectation in a particular grade/subject.
5. Accommodate student mobility for students who move between schools or in and out of traditional school settings.
6. Consider the measures of uncertainty (standard error) when determining whether an educational entity (district/school) is decidedly above or below the growth expectation.

Learning Loss Model Requirements

1. Use multiple prior assessment scores for each student to establish an expected score.
2. Compare the expected score to the results of assessments administered during the 2020-21 school year.
3. Aggregate differences between expected scores and actual scores to different groups of students to identify patterns in the data.

Learning Loss analysis research outcomes

1. Are there any patterns of learning loss within or across grades and subjects?
2. How do patterns of learning loss vary across schools and districts?
3. Did the amount of learning loss observed differ according to other available student-level or school-level characteristics such as those listed below, assuming the availability of data to identify these characteristics?
   1. Geographic regions
   2. Socioeconomic status
   3. Demographic category
   4. Other student characteristic category such as students with disabilities, English learners, foster, homeless, military connected, etc.,
4. Are there any exemplars across schools or districts where learning loss was limited, or inequities were limited?
5. Were these same patterns present in comparisons from previous years, such as from 2016-17 to 2018-19?

Reporting requirements:

1. Report student growth measures at the district, school, subject/grade and student subgroups.
2. Allow drill-down capabilities to easily navigate from the district, to school, to subject/grade, to student levels.
3. Categorize growth measures into performance levels based on the amount of evidence or statistical certainty.
4. Allow student growth results to be disaggregated into diagnostic reports showing growth at different achievement levels and test performance levels and for students with different characteristics.
5. Report up to 3 years of growth measures as well as a multi-year averages and composites.
6. Allow filter options to view the growth and projections of different subgroups of students, including the following possible options based on the availability of data:
   1. Race or ethnicity
   2. Gender
   3. Economically disadvantaged
   4. English language learner
   5. Special Education
   6. Full academic year enrollment
   7. Foster care
   8. Gifted
   9. Homeless
   10. Migrant
   11. Military Connected
7. Deliver student projections at the individual student level and aggregate school level by grade/subject indicating the probability of reaching specific performance levels/cut scores on future assessments.
8. Provide scatterplot reports with a statewide view of student growth and achievement across districts, schools, and teachers with flexibility to select custom axes and filter based on different student and school characteristics.
9. Provide College Readiness Reports that visually display how students in a district or school are projected to perform on the ACT and AP exams
10. Deliver reports through a fully hosted, Internet-based, electronic reporting system.
11. Provide technical support with accessibility through the web application and a ticketing system to track technical support requests. Make help files or other resources available within the web application to assist in the understanding and interpretation of reporting. Provide at least one sample delivered/developed for another state.

Access

1. The web reporting should be able to accommodate [anticipated capacity needs/number of concurrent users] at one time without failure.
2. Chosen vendor must assist with initial account setup for users statewide including:

   i.  State administrators

   1. District administrators
   2. District users, such as chief academic officers, curriculum and instructional specialists, and area/regional superintendents
   3. School administrators
   4. School users, such as teachers, counselors, and instructional Specialists
   5. Others identified by DEED
3. Include role-based permissions that allow educators to access information about the performance of the students within their immediate responsibility in accordance with applicable privacy laws.
4. A public version of the reporting website could be created with district and school level information only (no teacher or student level information). This would allow unrestricted access by parents, legislators, or other stakeholders.
5. Administrative users at the state, district, and school levels must have the ability to generate new accounts for personnel under their responsibility or change access permissions on existing accounts.
6. Access to reporting can be connected to the vendor Identity Management Portal.
7. Authorized users must be able to export the growth and projection results out of the reporting system so that those metrics can be imported and used within other state data systems.

Training and Support

1. Provide a training plan for professional development of DEED staff, district staff, and educators.
   1. eLearning Modules
   2. Virtual sessions
2. Provide evidence of user support documentation and communication materials delivered to other states for a variety of audiences, ranging from parents to district staff. This could include:
   1. Technical modeling documentation
   2. Simple modeling overviews
   3. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) documents
   4. Infographics
   5. District or school case studies
   6. Account maintenance guidance
   7. Research briefs
   8. Training materials

Student Information System Specific Elements

1. Vender-hosted
2. SSL encrypted
3. Many districts already use student information systems, such as PowerSchool, the statewide SIS needs to align with these standard systems.
4. Student level data on all elements collected by US ED: assessment data, attendance data, graduation rate and drop out data, College and Career Ready assessment data
5. Ability to match K-12 and higher education data
6. Standards for data collection, storage, and reporting
7. Statewide licensing of software and database structures

Experience Required:

1. The student growth analysis and reporting system and the student information system must be a Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) solution in a fully hosted environment.
2. Chosen vendor must have at least 20 years demonstrated experience providing growth and projection modeling and web reporting using tests that are on different scales, are not vertically aligned, and have changed over time
3. Chosen vendor must have at least 5 years performing longitudinal analysis on the following types of assessments:
   1. State summative assessments
   2. National Norm referenced Tests (optional)
   3. College readiness Assessments (optional)
   4. K-2 early learning assessments (optional)
4. Chosen vendor must have a track record of successful statewide implementations of the same proposed COTS solution in at least five (5) states.
5. Vendor must provide three (3) written references with contact information for three (3) state education agencies.
6. Chosen vendor must have developed and employed analytical models to assess the effects of the pandemic on student learning (also described as Unfinished Learning, Learning Loss, Learning Decline, etc.) in at least three (3) states.

Response Information:

 Interested parties are invited to submit responses to the following:

1. Statement of Interest for an interactive predictive data dashboard and/or a statewide student information system
   1. Company information
   2. Understanding of the project
   3. Approach to the project, please refer to the deliverables
   4. Hardware/Software required for this type of system

    

2. Statement of Qualifications
   1. Experience with similar projects
   2. Reference Experience Required above
   3. Data security information process with PII/SPII needed (FERPA)
   4. ADA Accessibility and WCAG 2.1 requirements

       

3. Cost proposal for an interactive predictive data dashboard and/or a statewide student information system.
   1. Creation of system
   2. Hosting costs for initial year and for 5 additional years
   3. Management and support for initial year and for 5 years
   4. Communication and Training expenses

Attachments:

• State Data Security Template
• WCAG 2/1 and ADA Accessibility

Important Notices:

This RFI does not extend any rights to prospective vendors or obligate the state to conduct a solicitation or purchase any goods or services, nor will the State be financially responsible for any costs associated with the preparation of any response for the requested information. This RFI is issued for the sole purpose of obtaining information as described in this notice.  However, the information obtained from this request may be used to prepare a purchase or solicitation in the future.

All questions must be directed to the Procurement Officer listed below in writing, via email.

The maximum size of a single email (including all text and attachments) that can be received by the State is 20mb (megabytes). If the email exceeds this size, the information must be sent in multiple emails that are each less than 20 megabytes and each email must comply with the requirements described above.

Interested parties must submit a written response by February 22, 2022, at 12:00 p.m., ADT. Responses may be sent by e-mail to the address below:

Procurement Officer contact information:

Kathy Blomquist

Procurement Officer

Department of Education and Early Development

Email: kathy.blomquist@alaska.gov

Please note: The State does not accept responsibility for failed e-mailed response deliveries. It is the responsibility of the interested party to follow up with the individual listed above to ensure your response was received prior to the deadline specified above.

Amendment One – Questions and Answers

1. Under the “Attachments” section, should there be templates for the vendor to use or are we required to create our own State Data Security Template and WCAG 2/1 and ADA Accessibility template/report? Please clarify your expectations from vendors.

   No templates in place we just ask that the vendor ensures they comply with the requirements which are Federal in nature.

    

2. Will RFI responses be publicly released before the RFP is posted?

   A request for records can be made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

    

3. What data elements are collected at a state level that the state would like to better integrate/intake?

   At the very least, DEED will want the data from the three main OASIS data collections.

   Expand to include other data collections- to be determined.

    

4. What data elements does DEED wish to make available on a public dashboard?

   To be determined.

    

5. Once the analytical platform is in place, do you want a vendor to be able to build additional reports?

   Yes

    

6. Does DEED seek the capability to perform analytics on unstructured (primarily text) analytics?

    To be determined

    

7. Is customer seeking to build a new Data Warehouse?

   Yes

    

8. How many source data tables within this system will be sent into the environment?

   To be determined

    

9. How many variables or columns are in these data tables? Can a range or maximum per data table be provided?

   To be determined

    

10. What format would this data be sent to the hosted environment? (Column or Comma Delimited, XLSX, Mainframe EBCDIC, Oracle Dump File, etc.)

    For importing into the R environment, CSV is good as long as there is a way to qualify commas that are part of text as non-delimiters. If not, then XLSX.. However, there may be other formats that are better for the database environment that DEED can explore.

     

11. Are there documents (such as data dictionary & data model) available & can be provided on contract signature?

    Yes

     

12. Please indicate the following number of user types:

    data scientists:

    zero

    users creating ad-hoc reports:

    data team of 6-10

    viewers of reports:

    data team, programmers, leadership 6-20

     

13. Please further describe the deliverables for ESSA,CARES Act, CRRSA Act, and ARP Act. Would the proposed solution need to create data submission files?

    COVID-19 data collections will be related to access to technology and mode of attendance. There would need to be a short-term data collection for these funds.

     

14. Please provide an estimate as to how many people will attend the training sessions for our proposed solution.

Alaska has 54 school districts. Participation in any sessions will vary - the anticipated maximum number would be 100.