Garbage In, Garbage Out: How to keep your SIS data clean
By Nick Wolf
There are few things more critical to the successful running of a school or district than the student information system. A good student information system (SIS) touches every aspect of an educational institution, from grades and attendance to parent contact to state reporting. The best, most advanced student information system, with all the bells and whistles, still runs on the data placed into the system, and if that data is inaccurate, poorly formatted, or doesn’t convey needed context, then the system will not function correctly. Garbage data going in will lead to garbage data coming out, which leads to poor outcomes for all aspects of K-12 operation.
The first step to keeping your SIS clean is data sanitization, making sure the data is in the right place at the right time. The vast majority of SIS’ rely on two methods of data collection; data file importation and manual entry by a staff member. A few SIS’ import data directly from admission software, or other user submitted forms, but those are relatively rare and come with different issues for another blog post. Imported data is among the easiest forms of data to clean, as you have all the tools of Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or Apple Numbers at your fingertips. Each column should be verified using data validation steps, such as the answers to these questions:
Is the data in the correct column?
Do phone numbers contain all the required digits?
Are the email addresses valid?
Are duplicates accounted for?
Is there a leading or trailing space in any of the cells (can be solved with the =trim() function)?
Each spreadsheet software will have built-in tools to use to verify each of the above questions, and just confirming those questions should have your data in a good place before import. If you’re not working from a spreadsheet, and instead rely on staff members to enter the data manually, more validation is required.
Data manually entered by staff members can have significant flaws, and the best way to account for issues will be building proper data entry procedures. One of the biggest causes of bad data entry is actually an issue with the source material itself. If collecting student contact or enrollment information, try to use a digital method rather than allowing your parents/students to handwrite their responses. Relying on penmanship is a surefire way to ensure data inaccuracies. One method to ease the digital divide is to provide an electronic device for your parents to use during enrollment, and to conduct your re-enrollment digitally. Your digital enrollment form can also use data validation to ensure that families enter their information in the correct format. If converting to digital data collection is impossible, centralizing your data entry is another method to ensure standardization, as relying on multiple staff members at multiple locations can lead to a wide variety of data issues.
However, procedures need to be tested, verified, and updated, and thus frequent data reviews are both helpful and necessary, particularly when beginning the process of cleaning your SIS data. With each new term, your data team should do a student and staff information export, and verify the data using the same questions listed above. Because data can be updated on a one-off basis within the SIS, this process allows a step back from the changes made throughout the year, and allows you to answer the same questions asked during import. It’s a great time to connect or merge parent contacts, ensure that siblings are connected in the system with the correctly associated contact information and address data, and will highlight potential failures in your data entry process. The end of each term is also a good time to make any wide scale data updates or changes, because report card time lends itself to student/parent information update self-reporting. A missing report card is a good impetus to ensure that the parents confirm their current email or mailing address.
Beyond ensuring that the data in your SIS is up to date, having a clean SIS is the first step in building a network of systems and integrators that will push your school or district to the next level, and is a requirement for both compliance and future expansion. When you know that your systems are running smoothly, many doors open up for your district, and potential integration and downstream problems will be limited. Join us next time for a blog posting about using the clean data in your SIS for integrations with other platforms, and how to choose the right core integrator for your organization.