MyDataFirst.com is an intuitive and secure online database that gives Literacy First teachers an easy-to-use tool to better understand each child's rapidly changing literacy needs. Literacy First added MyDataFirst.com to its K-12 services to assist teachers and administrators in managing their dynamic learning environments.
MyDataFirst.com also equips school and district administrators with an effective, data-driven management tool for the larger educational system. Finally, the data generated by teachers and administrators provides a rich base for insightful scientific research at all levels — individual, class, school, district, and national.
MyDataFirst.com Sample Report
(PDF, 55kb)
Learn more about MyDataFirst.Com
- Goal of MyDataFirst.Com
- Design Criteria
- Managerial and Scientific Research Opportunities
- Self-Validating
- Real-Time Data
Goal of MyDataFirst.Com
The goal of MyDataFirst.Com is to equip teachers with data tools to understand what a given child needs on a given day, without time-consuming, cumbersome recordkeeping.
Design Criteria of MyDataFirst.Com
- Provide quick and easy student data entry for each Literacy First assessment.
- Focus teacher attention on the “next literacy skill” for each child.
- Enable collaboration with other teachers to flexibly group students from multiple classes around a common “next literacy skill.”
- Capture student performance on state assessments.
- Generate individual and class profiles for each assessment based on real-time data.
- Monitor individual and class on-grade-level progress.
- Capture student demographics such as gender, race, English proficiency, free and reduced lunch status, special educational needs, etc.
- Post announcements/messages for users when they log in.
- Access data at all levels-student, class, grade, school, and district.
- Log confidential teacher observation notes.
- Monitor on-grade-level progress by class, grade, and school.
- See data-driven accountability for teacher performance over time.
Managerial and Scientific Research Opportunities
MyDataFirst.Com serves as a platform for managerial and scientific research that
- illuminates trends, correlations, and causes and effects in both teacher and student performances, and
- unlocks, at the most global level, greater understanding of how children acquire literacy and how best to assist them in this most important of discoveries.
Self-Validating
MyDataFirst.Com is self-validating, which ensures that only good data is put in. First, teachers are kept close to granular, student-level data because their direct relationships with students makes them the most likely to recognize and correct inaccuracies. Moreover, data-driven accountability places a high incentive on teachers to make sure their data is accurate.
Real-Time Data
When data is entered for one student, the change is instantly reflected in class, grade, school, district, and national analyses. This is especially important in the team approach of the Literacy First model where teachers work with students from various classes that are grouped together based on where the students “are” today.
Longitudinal
Students’ data follows them from grade to grade and from school to school, even if they move to another district or another state. Over time, this longitudinal capacity will reveal temporal performance trajectories and underlying causal relationships.
Granular and Aggregate
MyDataFirst fits your data needs by providing users with a view of the data that captures only what they want and need to see. For teachers, this means very granular student data for only their students. For administrators, this means moderately aggregated data for only their school(s), with the capacity to wade into more granular data if and when desired.
Geographically Diverse
Literacy First serves schools across the country. This allows for the identification of norms and trends for making comparisons, and for establishing benchmarks at multiple levels of geography-school, district, state, and region. This not only serves the ends of scientific research, but also allows schools, districts, and states to comparatively evaluate their own progress and performance.
Connected to Other Disciplines
Using normed state assessments, MyDataFirst connects students’ Literacy First data to other disciplines such as math and science, as well as to outside measures of literacy acquisition.