PAR Releases Student Success Matrix

The Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework, which is managed by the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), has released its Student Success Matrix (SSMx), a tool intended to help higher education institutions improve student outcomes through the effective use of supports and interventions.

According to information released by PAR, the SSMx can capture supports delivered face-to-face, online, or through other media. Sixteen member institutions have already submitted more than 1.7 million anonymized student records and more than 12 million institutionally de-identified course-level records to the PAR Framework's dataset. Educational institutions can use that multi-institutional information to help identify the most effective tools to improve student outcomes

"Helping higher education derive and implement standard terminology and common practices for scaling institutional effectiveness and student improvement is at the heart of the PAR Framework,” said Beth Davis, project director of the PAR Framework, in a prepared statement. “Following the open publication of the core PAR Framework data element definitions, this publication of common definitions for categorizing student supports creates the opportunity to compare the effects of student success efforts across institutions. We are excited to be creating the tools and frameworks to evaluate retention strategies."

The PAR Framework has published a public version of the Student Success Matrix definitions online through the Data Cookbook, a collaborative data dictionary and data management tool for higher education built by IData. The SSMx is the latest tool to be released by the PAR Framework under a Creative Commons license.

The PAR Framework is a data-mining cooperative made up of two-year, four-year, public, proprietary, traditional, and progressive institutions. The institutions contribute anonymized student data and expertise to help figure out why students drop out of higher education and ways of improving graduation rates.

The public Student Success Matrix definitions can be found on the Data Cookbook's site, and further information about the SMMx can be found on the PAR Framework's site.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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