At Your Fingertips: Using Everyday Data to Improve Schools

At Your Fingertips is a practical step-by-step guide to selecting, analyzing and reporting critical information in an easy-to-understand and compelling manner. With authentic examples, crisp instructions, clear language and straightforward worksheets, this workbook will lead you through a highly effective process to build a home grown performance indicator system consistent with your school's core goals.

Drawing on their work with schools across the country, Karen Levesque and her colleagues at MPR Associates, with support from the National Center for Research in Vocational Education, have created a book that provides school people with a means to systematically marshal valid, reliable and trustworthy data to communicate more effectively with parents, school boards and state officials. As schools seek to improve the quality of education they provide, At Your Fingertips promises to uncover problems before they become deep seated and to recognize accomplishments that deserve to be celebrated and emulated.

Karen Levesque is a senior research associate at MPR Associates where she directs a broad range of data analysis studies for the National Center for Education Statistics. A graduate of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, she has extensive experience conducting research and policy studies about education practices and the use of data in both secondary schools and institutions of higher education. Recently, Ms. Levesque participated in a study that examined the preliminary effects of performance measures and standards at the state and local level and found that although the states generally responded enthusiastically to developing performance measurement systems, this enthusiasm rarely translated into local use of data. In part, as a result of this investigation, Ms. Levesque assembled a team of MPR researchers to develop a workbook for schools on using data for continuous improvement - At Your Fingertips: Using Everyday Data to Improve Schools.