nde drs user manual · web viewend user manual version 3.0 date: 11/1/09 table of contents...

Nebraska Department of EducationData Reporting SystemEnd User ManualVersion 3.0

Date: 11/1/09

Nebraska Department of Education Data Reporting System User Manual

Table of Contents1. Version History........................................................................................................................32. Purpose and Objectives............................................................................................................33. What is DRS?..........................................................................................................................34. What are the Areas within DRS?.............................................................................................45. What Information can I find in DRS?......................................................................................56. How do I Navigate within DRS?.............................................................................................57. How do I Search within DRS?.................................................................................................98. What are Categories?.............................................................................................................109. What is Quick Facts?.............................................................................................................1110. How do I Access Information in Quick Facts?...................................................................1111. How do I Download a Document from Quick Facts..........................................................1312. What is Guided Inquiry?.....................................................................................................1613. What will I find in Guided Inquiry?...................................................................................1614. What will I not find in Guided Inquiry?.............................................................................1815. How do I run a Public Site Guided Inquiry Report?..........................................................1816. How do I run a Secured Site Guided Inquiry Report?........................................................2217. How do I download a Guided Inquiry Report?..................................................................2518. What is Advanced Inquiry?................................................................................................2819. What will I find in Advanced Inquiry?...............................................................................2820. What will I not find in Advanced Inquiry?.........................................................................2921. What are the Different Areas of a Dashboard?...................................................................2922. How do I Drill Down within a Dashboard?........................................................................3023. How can I download Data from a Dashboard?...................................................................3324. Data Masking......................................................................................................................35


1. Version HistoryRevision Chart

Date Version Description Author(s) Role11/20/09 1.0 Initial Creation Ruth Cook Business

Analyst11/24/09 2.0 Updated screen shots to reflect

changes made during UAT.Ruth Cook Business

Analyst09/07/10 3.0 Updated screen shots to reflect

changes made after migrating application to SharePoint 2010.

Adriana Guzman Consultant

2. Purpose and Objectives

Welcome to the Nebraska Department of Education’s Data Reporting System User Manual. The purpose of this document is to guide you in effectively using the Data Reporting System tools and functions so that you may find information that is important to you regarding education in Nebraska. At the end of this document, you should be able to: • Describe the purpose of the Nebraska Department of Education’s Data Reporting System (DRS) • Briefly describe the kinds of information that can be found in the DRS • Efficiently navigate within the DRS • Locate and download documents • Generate and download reports • Perform an advanced search • Describe the purpose of the Dashboard • Download data from the Dashboard

3. What is the DRS?

The Data Reporting System (DRS) provides student achievement results for the state, school districts and individual school buildings.

The DRS also displays federal accountability results, student characteristics data, early childhood education data, career education data, special populations data, and education staff data in three main content areas, Quick Facts, Guided Inquiry, and Advanced Inquiry.

The DRS provides two separate web sites targeted at difference audiences. Public site: Provides masked data analysis at the state level. This site does not require a login to run reports or download documentation. Anonymous access is provided at http://drs.education.ne.gov. Secured site: Provides unmasked data access to education consortiums as well as school district and building level analysis. This site requires secured login and activation through the NDE Portal http://portal.education.ne.gov.


4. What are the Areas within DRS?

Figure 1: Data Reporting System (DRS) Home Page

Quick Facts: In Quick Facts, you can access various documents that are organized under several specific categories. These documents can be opened for reading online or for printing. The documents can also be downloaded and saved to your computer.

Guided Inquiry: The Guided Inquiry area lets you explore more specific information in various ways. Select from various search criteria and click “View Report” or “Apply” to retrieve the information. The resulting report can be printed or exported into other document formats like Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, or Acrobat PDF (portable document format).

Advanced Inquiry: Use the flexible tools in Advanced Inquiry to locate very specific information and interact with it in various ways using “Dashboards”. Dashboards are described in section 19 of this document.

Training Center: Check the training center for various training materials and resources.


Quick Links: Click these links to access websites outside the DRS. Each site will open in a new browser window.

DRS Wheel: This image displays all of the DRS main information categories and their related icons. The DRS Wheel appears on the main page of the Quick Facts, Guided Inquiry and Advanced Inquiry areas. You can click any of the categories in the wheel to go to the page for that category.

5. What Information can I find in DRS?

The following types of information can be found in the DRS: Student achievement results statewide are on the public site Student achievement results by individual school building, school district and statewide are on

the secured site Student characteristics Early childhood education data Career education data Data about special populations Data about education staff

The DRS also contains Quick Links to the Nebraska Department of Education website, the Nebraska State of the Schools Report, and the US Department of Education website.

6. How do I Navigate within DRS?

Each time you enter the DRS, you will be taken to the DRS home page. From here you can quickly navigate to other pages within the DRS.


Figure 2: DRS Home Page with Highlighted Menu Bar

A menu bar is located near the top of the page. See Figure 2 above. This menu bar is accessible from any page within the DRS. The three main areas in the DRS are Quick Facts, Guided Inquiry and Advanced Inquiry. Click the main heading on the menu bar for each one to go the main page for that area. You can also click one of the information category links under the main heading to go directly to that information category page. Hover your mouse over the main heading to display the list of information category links available for that area as shown in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3: Information Categories for Advanced Inquiry


The Training Center link will take you to the area of the DRS that contains online training and additional reference materials. Click the DRS home link to return to the DRS home page.

Figure 4: DRS Wheel

You can access any of the DRS information categories within each area using either the menu drop-down list, or by using the icons in the DRS wheel. From the Quick Facts home page, to go to the page for a category, click either the category name on the menu or click the icon in the DRS wheel that represents that category. For example, to go to the page for Career Education, click the category name in the menu or click the icon in the DRS wheel as shown in Figure 5 below.


Figure 5: DRS Wheel with Highlighted Category

When the page for that category opens the icon representing the category appears on the left also a page name indicator appears at the top of each to indicate the page location within DRS.

Figure 6: Career Education page

Click the home link to return to the DRS home page from any page.


7. How do I Search within DRS?

A search tool is located in the upper right corner of each page within the DRS.

Figure 7: DRS Home Page with Search Tool Highlighted

To perform a simple search, type a word or phrase into the search field. Click the magnifying glass icon to initiate the search. The DRS will only retrieve documents containing the word, or phrase, entered. It will not retrieve dashboard reports.

To enter more specific search criteria, click the ‘Advanced Search’ link.


Figure 8: Advanced Search Screen

All fields on the Advanced Search page are optional. Use the fields provided to narrow your search for certain words or phrases.

Filter the search results by document type by using the ‘Result Type’ drop down selection. You can limit the search to retrieve only Documents, Word documents, Excel documents, or Presentations. The default selection is ‘All Results.’

Finally, you can limit results to those documents that have specific properties. For example, you can limit to documents by a specific author and creation date. Choose desired properties from the lists provided. To add more properties click the Add Property link. To delete a property click the Delete Property link.

Once you have entered your advanced search criteria, click the Search button to view the results.

8. What are Categories?

All DRS data has been organized under specific categories. The categories are: State Assessment – Reading Performance, Mathematics Performance, Science Performance, and

Writing Performance Federal Accountability: No Child Left Behind (NCLB) – Yearly progress measures


Student Characteristics – Fall Membership and Enrollment (students served throughout the year) counts

Early Childhood Education – Participation and Demographics Career Education – Performance, Programs of Study, Demographics, and Participation Special Populations – Demographics, Performance, and Participation Education Staff – Administrators, Teachers, other Professionals, Curriculum, and Courses District and School Information – Descriptions and Contact Information

You will use these categories to locate information in the Quick Facts, Guided Inquiry and Advanced Inquiry areas of the DRS.

9. What is Quick Facts?

Quick Facts contains libraries of reports and documents that are organized under the main information categories. Quick Facts does not offer the ability to interact with data or perform automated analysis. It contains only static reports in various document formats. The following table outlines the information that can be found within Quick Facts:

Category Perspective Static Reports (Word, Excel, PDF)

State Assessment Standards based tests

Statewide based tests

Data download files Writing data downloads

Federal Accountability: NCLB Adequate Yearly Progress

AYP: School improvement data downloads

AYP: Instructions and DiagramsStudent Characteristics Membership

Enrollment ESS: County membership (Grade,

race, gender) Stats and Facts

Special Populations Special Education Annual Performance Report – Parts B and C

Education Staff Admin, teachers, other professionals

Curriculum & Courses

Stats and facts, instructional tables, FTE by position, race and gender

Early Childhood Education Indicators Annual Evaluation ReportCareer Education Performance

Programs of Study Annual Career Education Report

District and School Information N/A PDF Directory Document (ESS)

10. How do I Access Information in Quick Facts?


Start on the DRS home page to start your search. Place your mouse over Quick Facts in the main menu bar. The menu will expand to show all of the main categories by which information is sorted within Quick Facts.

Figure 9: Quick Facts Category Drop Down Menu

To go to the Quick Facts main page click on the Quick Facts menu header. Select a category directly from the menu or from the DRS wheel to go to the quick facts page for that category.

Select a category link. We selected ‘Career Education’ as shown in Figure 10. The top of the page indicate the page you are viewing. All quick facts documents associated with this category appear in the main body of the page.


Figure 10: Quick Facts Career Education Document Library

You may scroll through the list to locate items that are of interest to you.

11. How do I Download a Document from Quick Facts

Start the download process by locating a document in one of the Quick Facts information categories. For this example, we will use the ‘Career Education’ documents.


Figure 11: Quick Facts Career Education Document Library

If the document library contains folders, click on the folder name to display any sub-folders and documents within that folder.


Figure 12: Download document warning message

When you have found the document you want to download, click the document name. A warning message will display. Click ‘OK’ to continue (Figure 12 above). To save a copy of a document to your computer click the save icon. Locate the folder in your computer where you want to save the document. Click ‘Save’ to save a copy of the document to your computer. To cancel this action, click ‘Cancel’. (Figure 13 below).


Figure 13: Save As dialog box

12. What is Guided Inquiry?

Guided Inquiry provides a limited set of filtering tools and pre-defined parameters that enable users to run data reports within the various DRS categories. Guided Inquiry Reports generate information that is more specific or granular than the information found in the Quick Facts document libraries. The information categories in Guided Inquiry are the same as those in Quick Facts and Advanced Inquiry.

13. What will I find in Guided Inquiry?

Use the Guided Inquiry area when you want to quickly find specific information within a certain category in DRS. Select specific search criteria within a set of pre-defined parameters to generate a short summary report that displays the data both graphically and in table format. Examples of the different areas of a Guided Inquiry report are provided below.


Figure 44: Pre-Defined parameters to select report data

Figure 15: Graphical representation of data for parameters selected

Figure 16: Tabular representation of data for parameters selected along with report foot notes

Guided Inquiry parameter settings in the Public site appear at the top of the screen. Guided Inquiry parameter settings in the Secured site appear on the right side of the screen.


14. What will I not find in Guided Inquiry?

Guided Inquiry is designed to generate brief reports on specific data and present the information in a summary format. These reports can be exported to Word, Excel or PDF. Guided Inquiry does not contain complete documents or presentations like those found in the Quick Facts document libraries.

15. How do I run a Public Site Guided Inquiry Report?

This section will describe how to generate a Guided Inquiry report in the Public Site. We will use the Education Staff category as an example.

Figure 17: Guided Inquiry Category Drop Down Menu

Start your search from the DRS Home Page. Place your mouse cursor over Guided Inquiry on the menu bar and then click Education Staff from the category drop down menu.


Figure 18: Guided Inquiry Education Staff Document Library

Click a report name in the list of available reports. For example, select ‘Average Experience – School District.’

Choose a school district from the ‘District’ list on the screen that appears.


Figure 19: Guided Inquiry Report Main Page

After making this selection, the remaining parameter fields are activated. You can either accept ‘All’ as the default setting, or you can choose additional parameters from these lists to filter the results.

Figure 5: All Possible Parameters

When you have selected the desired parameters, click ‘View Report’ to generate the report.


Figure 21: Guided Inquiry Report with Highlighted Toolbar

The following features are available in the toolbar located at the top of the report for every report. A page indicator, highlighted with a red rectangle, shows the number of pages in the document. Use the forward and back arrows at the top to navigate between different pages.

To zoom in or out, select a setting from the zoom drop-down list which is highlighted with a yellow rectangle.

The search box is highlighted with a green rectangle. You can enter a word or phrase to search for in the document and click ‘Find.’ The word or phrase will be highlighted in the document. To find the next instance of the word or phrase, click ‘Next.’

Use the feature highlighted with a purple rectangle to export the report to one of several file formats. Click the drop-down arrow and select the desired format. For example, select Acrobat PDF and then click ‘Export.’ You can open the report in the new format or click ‘Save’ to save a copy to your computer.

Click the refresh icon, highlighted with a green ovoid, to re-generate the current report.

If you want to re-generate the report using different parameter selections, change the desired parameters, and then click ‘View report.’


16. How do I run a Secured Site Guided Inquiry Report?

This section will describe how to generate a Guided Inquiry report in the Public Site. We will use the Education Staff category as an example.

Place your mouse cursor over Guided Inquiry. Then click ‘Education Staff’ from the category menu.

Figure 22: Guided Inquiry Category Drop Down Menu

Click a report name in the list of available reports. In this case we will use ‘Average Experience – School District’.


Figure 23: Guided Inquiry Education Staff Document Library

Choose a district from the District drop down box.

Figure 24: Guided Inquiry Report Main Page

After making this selection, the remaining parameter fields are activated. You can either accept ‘All’ as the default setting, or you can choose additional parameters from these lists to filter the results.


Figure 65: All Possible Parameters

When you have selected the desired parameters scroll to the bottom and click ‘Apply’ to generate the report.

Figure 76: Apply button


The following features are available in the toolbar located at the top of the report for every report. A page indicator, highlighted with a red rectangle, shows the number of pages in the document. Use the forward and back arrows at the top to navigate between different pages.

To zoom in or out, select a setting from the zoom drop-down list which is highlighted with a yellow rectangle.

The search box is highlighted with a green rectangle. You can enter a word or phrase to search for in the document and click ‘Find.’ The word or phrase will be highlighted in the document. To find the next instance of the word or phrase, click ‘Next.’

Figure 27: Guided Inquiry Report with Highlighted Toolbar

17. How do I download a Guided Inquiry Report?

After generating a Guided Inquiry report, you may download the report and save it on your computer. To download the report, you must first export the report to one of the available file formats.

To export the report, click the drop-down arrow and select the desired format as illustrated in Figure 28 for Public Site and Figure 29 for Secured Site. For example, select PDF.


Figure 88: Public Side Guided Inquiry Export Options


Figure 99: Secured Side Guided Inquiry Export Options

A new window will open.

Figure 30: File Download Pop Up

Click ‘Save’ to save a copy to your computer. Choose a folder where you want to save the file and click ‘Save’ again.


Figure 31: Save As Pop Up

18. What is Advanced Inquiry?

Advanced Inquiry offers users the ability to search within DRS categories for information using a limited set of filtering tools and pre-defined parameters. Users can locate and interact with detailed information within Advanced Inquiry in ways that are not available in either Quick Facts or Guided Inquiry.

The information categories in Advanced Inquiry are the same as those in Quick Facts and Guided Inquiry.

Advanced Inquiry in the secured site allows reporting by districts and schools.

19. What will I find in Advanced Inquiry?

Use the Dashboards in Advanced Inquiry to generate data that you can view in different ways, drill-down, and even download to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to conduct your own analysis. You can also export data to a Microsoft Power Point presentation.Advanced Inquiry reports are more dynamic and interactive than the reports generated within Quick Facts or Guided Inquiry.


Figure 32: State Assessment Dashboard Library

20. What will I not find in Advanced Inquiry?

Advanced Inquiry is designed to generate detailed reports using dashboards. Advanced Inquiry does not contain static documents or presentations.

21. What are the Different Areas of a Dashboard?

Figure 26 highlights the different areas within the Advanced Inquiry dashboards. Each are is described below.


Figure 33: Dashboard with Highlighted Areas

Parameters: Choose from among the parameters displayed. You can generate dashboards for the entire State, a district, or an individual school.

Key Indicators Table: Each Dashboard displays the Key indicators table. Click a key indicator to display a data chart. This information can be downloaded to Microsoft PowerPoint or Excel.

Chart: When a key indicator in the table is clicked, the corresponding data will be displayed in this chart. You can click the bars in the chart to interact with the data and perform analysis. This information can be downloaded to Microsoft PowerPoint or Excel.

Key Indicator definition: When a key indicator in the table is clicked, its definition appears here.

22. How do I Drill Down within a Dashboard?

The drill down feature allows you to dig deeper into the dashboard data that you generated using the parameters at the top of the dashboard. To drill-down in a dashboard, place your mouse over a bar in the graph. Right-click on the bar. A menu will appear. Place your mouse over ‘Drill Down To’ and a submenu will appear with several drill down options.


Figure 34: Chart with Drill Down Menu

Click on one of the options in the drill down menu. For this example, we will click on the ‘Grade Level’ option.


Figure 35: Writing Proficiency drilled down to Grade level

A legend appears at the right of the graph indicating which grade each color represents. If you hover your mouse over the data points in the graph, you will see what the data values for that point are.

To display information about what the chart shows, right-click anywhere in the chart other than on a data line and choose ‘Show Information.’


Figure 36: Chart with Information Header

An information banner will appear beneath the chart title, as illustrated in Figure 26. This information banner describes the data that you are reviewing within the dashboard.

23. How can I download Data from a Dashboard?

You can easily download data into Microsoft PowerPoint or Excel from both the Key Indicators table and the Graph. Click the small arrow above either the Key Indicators table or the Graph.


Figure 37: Download Options for Key Indicators

A menu will appear, as illustrated in Figure 17. Select either ‘Export to PowerPoint or ‘Export to Excel.’

Figure 38: File Download Options

Click ‘Open’ to view the file for analysis. Click Save’ to save it to your computer in order to use for future analysis. Choose a folder where you want to save the file and click ‘Save’ again.


Figure 39: File Download Options

24. Data Masking

Figure 30 illustrated footnotes at the bottom of the Guided Inquiry reports (See the illustration below).

Figure 40: Guided Inquiry Report Foot Notes

The footnotes next to the asterisk (*) describe data masking rules that are applied within the DRS. Data masking is applied to records so that data may not be used to identify individual students. For example, if you could drill down to review how all students who have Free and Reduced Lunch performed on specific


assessments. If results were then broken down by ethnicity, you may see that all students of a specific ethnicity were on Free and Reduced Lunch. If you knew that there was only one student of that ethnicity in the grade selected, you could easily identify that the student was on a Free and Reduced Lunch plan. Data masking helps to eliminate that identification. The asterisks will appear in both Guided Inquiry reports and Advanced Inquiry Dashboards in the following situations:

The number of records returned for your query is less than 10 The number of records returned was equal to 100% of the students queried