Toolkit for Effective Data Use

The data collection, analysis, and reporting process can be daunting for an analyst of any level.  We developed a Toolkit for Effective Data Use that supports rigorous data analysis to inform decision-making based on the intensive work the Strategic Data Project has completed with partner agencies (school districts, states, and CMO’s from across the nation).  We hope this toolkit helps you produce salient analyses that will push senior leadership in your organization to think about how the data that already exists within your system can be used differently!

ACCESS THE TOOLKIT for free by signing up for an activation code with your email.

The toolkit constitutes a set of resources to help analysts at an education agency:

• build clean and functional datasets,

• produce interesting and meaningful analyses that inform decision-making, and

• develop the building blocks to replicate the SDP Human Capital and College-Going diagnostics, a standard set of analyses we have performed across seven partner agencies to date. To learn more about the Human Capital and College-Going diagnostics visit www.gse.harvard.edu/sdp/diagnostics.

In its entirety, the toolkit consists of five documents, each mapped against a stage in the data collection and analysis process:

	Identify essential data elements for analyzing student achievement. SDP Data Specification Guide: Successful data analysis begins with proper identification of data elements necessary to answer key questions of interest.
	Clean, check, and build variables for your dataset. SDP Data Building Tasks: Upon collecting essential data elements you need to ensure that the data can be reliably used in future analyses.
	Connect relevant datasets from different sources. SDP Linking Guide: Now that you’ve collected data and cleaned your data, you’ll want to merge the files together to create an analysis file.
	Analyze your datasets. SDP College-Going Success Analysis Guide: The final step in the SDP Toolkit for Effective Data Use is to analyze the data you’ve identified, cleaned, and connected.
	Adopt best practices to facilitate shared and replicable data analysis. SDP Coding Style Guide: To ensure that statistical code is easily shared across a team and is replicable by future users, SDP and the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) recommends that you follow best coding, programming, and data management practices.

SDP hosted a series of webinars to support your use of our toolkit!  You can find the presentations and recordings from these webinars here:

At SDP, we are always looking for ways to improve our products. As you work through the various documents, be sure to let us know what you think with feedback and suggestions at the following link: SDP Toolkit Feedback.  We are happy to help you troubleshoot your way through the toolkit by emailing .