Podium Use Cases & How-Tos
In this section, we will explain a variety of Podium use cases and highlight some key functionality. This is not an exhaustive list of questions—but—is meant to illustrate how to answer your questions using the Podium dashboards including utilizing sorting, filtering, and cross-filtering.
Chronic Absenteeism—Exploring All Sections of The Dashboard
To familiarize ourselves with the Podium dashboard structure, we will illustrate how to answer a variety of questions related to chronic absenteeism. Please navigate to the Chronic Absenteeism dashboard to follow along. We will explore how to find the district rate, which schools have the highest rates, drilling into student groups, and looking at specific students.
1) What is the district's current chronic absence rate?
The Chronic Absenteeism dashboard will default to the most recent year and date of attendance data that has been pushed to Ed-Fi. To understand if the date is current enough to answer this question, you can look at the date in the Most Recent box in the top left or the date in the Custom End Date filter (which will always be the same).
If the data is not up-to-date, please review your Ed-Fi push schedule internally. Once you have determined your data is up-to-date, you can turn to answering the question of the current chronic absenteeism rate for the entire district.
Let's continue to figure out how to answer the question by looking at the default filters applied. To review, the data defaults to the most recent year and date, but it also defaults to student enrolled on the end date selected. This is shown by the Enrolled value on the Select Current Enrollment Status.
This view is helpful if we want to know the chronic absenteeism rate for intervention purposes, but if we want to understand what chronic absenteeism rate will look like at the end of the year we may want to review students that were enrolled and met the chronic absenteeism threshold that year.
To view that, select the 'X' next to Enrolled in the filter. When no filter value is selected, it means that all values will be reflected in the data. Then, the Apply Filters button will turn blue. Now, click to apply the new filter selections.
To find your answer, you can look underneath the District Metrics heading. These boxes will always display the overall district results and does not respond to any of the student group filters. All users (both school and district level users) are able to see these district-level metrics.
2) Which schools have the highest rates of Chronic Absenteeism?
Given the filters previously selected, we can answer this question without needing to revisit them.
In all of the domain dashboards, there is a school table to the right of the District Metrics or in the top center of Key Metrics. The school table is consistently framed around the key question it helps answer: “What is the Chronic Absence Rate by School?” Only district leaders can answer this question as they have access to data across all schools. School leaders will only see their own school in the school table.
Click on the column name in order to sort ascending or descending. The direction of the arrow next to the column will indicate which way the data is sorted. Sort the Chronic Absence Rate column descending in order to see the schools with the highest rates at the top.
3) What is the chronic absence rate for third grade students?
There are a few methods that we can use to answer to this question.
One way is to review the Student Group section of the Chronic Absenteeism dashboard. Scroll to the bottom of the dashboard to the section that displays Chronic Absenteeism rates by multiple student groups and programs. These include grade level, race/ethnicity, gender or birth sex, MLL/EL, special education, 504 eligibility, and economic disadvantage.
Review the Grade Level chart to answer this question. You can trace the third grade bar to find the percent or hover over the bar to see the tooltip.
What if you want to examine the third grade rates across schools or only review the third grade students in the student table? That is where filters and/or cross filters come in. Click on the third grade bar to cross-filter the rest of the data to only show third grade students. Or, you can select “3” in the Select Grade Level filter and click Apply Filters.
You can hover over the number in the top right of any chart to make sure that the filters have been applied.
You can also answer this question by looking at the Average Daily Attendance dashboard. The Average Daily Attendance dashboard has Chronic Absence Rate as a metric in the school table. So, you can answer this question in the school table by applying a filter for the third grade.
4) Which students are on the edge of chronic absenteeism?
For this question, we will look at the Average Daily Attendance dashboard. Remember to start by clearing all your filters if you applied filters for the question above. Hit Clear All twice and then select Apply Filters.
Similar to the Chronic Absenteeism dashboard, review the default filters and confirm that they make sense to answer your question. In this case, it may make sense to look at only enrolled students if we are asking this to figure out which students with whom to intervene.
First, let's explore the key metrics charts and see if any answer the question. We can also look at the About this Dashboard modal which has all of the metric descriptions to see if there are any metrics that answer my question.
The metrics section describes the At-Risk Attendance group as students that have an attendance rate on the edge of chronic absence. Let's look at the key metrics to find the corresponding chart. The “How are attendance rates distributed?” chart has this information. It shows the number of students in each of the categories.
Click on the 2-At Risk Attendance bar in order to cross-filter the rest of the dashboard down to those students.
You can then sort the student table to see the students that are closest to the chronic absence threshold in this group. On the far right of the table you can find contact information for each student. The contact listed here is the contact marked as the primary contact in the Ed-Fi data.
Finally, you could download this table in order to combine with other data or share with colleagues to take action. Please remember that this table contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII), so you must download and share it in a secure manner.
Behavior—Cross-Filtering & Drawing Conclusions
1) How many discipline actions does this student have? Which discipline actions and how many were In-School Suspensions (ISS)?
To answer these questions, we will look at the Behavior Dashboard.
While looking at the Behavior Dashboard, remember that if you are looking at previous year you will need to clear the current enrollment filter as there are no currently enrolled students in previous years.
First, let's look at the student table and sort discipline actions descending in order to see the students with the most discipline actions.
In the demo data, we will look closer at Constance Hughes' behavior data. From this data we can see that Constance has had 8 discipline actions and both ISS and Out-of-School Suspensions (OSS) actions. We can also see that her attendance is not correlated with the discipline actions and she doesn't miss much school. But, what if we want to know which actions those are?
This is where filtering or cross-filtering comes in. You can either select “Constance” in the Select Student filter or click on the cell in the student table with her name. Now all of the non-district metrics charts are cross-filtered to just Constance's data.
We can look at the distribution of behavior types and discipline actions charts to gain more information. By hovering over the bars, we can see that Constance has had the action codes In-School Suspension, No Action for Incident, Other, Community Service, and Out-of-School Suspension. Most of these actions come from violations of the School Code of Conduct. By looking at the In-School Suspension bar, we can see that she has had two in school suspensions.
Assessment—Filtering & Key Metrics
1) How does School A's score on the State Grade 3 ELA Exam compare to the district?
In order to find our answer to this, we will start in the Assessment Dashboard:
Since we want to look at the state summative exam, we will want to select the Spring test season. This will allow us to see all of the assessments taken in spring in the Select Assessment drop down. In the demo data, we select the SC Ready 3 English/Language Arts exam. Then, apply the filters. The dashboard data will now show only schools that have results for this exam.
In order to find out how each School did compared to the rest of the district, we will look at the table "What is the Average Scale Score by School?" To better view this table, click on the Fullscreen option. On the far-right side of the table you should see the Average Scale Score and the Difference from District Avg columns.
You can sort the Difference from District Avg column to discover the highest and lowest performing schools.
If you are a district leader and want to look at a combination of schools, you could select a few schools in the filter bar on the left. You can then compare the Summary Average from those selected schools with the overall district average.
Enrollment—Combining Filters
1) What are my enrollment numbers of different combinations of student groups? For example, how many 4th grade male ML students have been enrolled at any point this year?
To find the answer to this question, we'll start on the Enrollment dashboard. We will look at one of the elementary schools.
In the filter bar, select one of the elementary schools. Then, scroll down to the Student Groups section of the filter bar and choose 4th grade and male students.
With the above filters applied, the school table shows us the number of enrolled 4th grade male students and the number of late entries or withdrawals.
As a district viewer, you might like to find out why one student had withdrawn from this school. By scrolling down to the chart, "What are Withdrawals by Type?" you can find out the reason for the withdrawal. In this sample case, the student transferred out of the school.
If you're a school principal and you want a breakdown of the ethnicity of male students in the 4th grade for state reporting purposes, you can scroll down to the Race/Ethnicity chart and see the breakdown of enrollment by Race/Ethnicity.
Finally, users can see the breakdown of enrollment by MLL/ELL status, the Special Education status, and Economic Disadvantage status for 4th grade male students. By hovering over the blue number in one of these categories, you can see the filters that have been applied to see the different student group filters applied.