‘Data rich and information poor’: How a coalition of Hamilton education leaders is analyzing data to better understand student success
For the first time in Ontario, a coalition of education leaders has launched a data-sharing project that aims to make information about Hamilton students' academic pathways available to researchers and policy-makers.
The Hamilton Community Research Partnership, which on Wednesday released a pilot research project years in the making, comprises six partners - public and Catholic school boards, McMaster University, Mohawk College, the Hamilton Community Foundation and the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) - with a common goal: to create one data set that would allow us to track students over time," said HEQCO director of policy, research and partnerships Jackie Pichette.
Ontario does not have a data infrastructure that researchers or educators can use to assess how our education system is working," she said.
Pichette said educators know very little about the students' experiences" before they begin a program or start at a new school, meaning it's nearly impossible" to identify their needs.
More broadly, it makes it impossible for policy-makers ... to understand how our system is working as a whole and how it may be unfairly advantaging or disadvantaging certain groups of students over time," she said.
Ontario does collect data, but its use is restricted to the government, making the province data rich and information poor," Pichette said.
A coalition was formed to address the problem, resulting a data set analyzing local students who pursued post-secondary education at McMaster and Mohawk, as well as two research papers - one that presents findings and one that details the data-collection process.
The group linked existing data from the Ontario Education Number (OEN) - a number assigned to all students in the province connected to information like age, gender, date and place of birth and postal code - with that of post-secondary partners and college and university application centres.
Two demographic factors, neighbourhood and secondary stream, showed striking advantages along educational pathways," she said. Students from higher-income neighbourhoods were more likely to graduate, go to university and pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs, which lead to higher earnings. Students in the applied stream in high school were less likely to graduate and attend post-secondary.
The province has since destreamed all Grade 9 courses.
Our research really highlights the fact that this was an important step," Pichette said. We're hopeful that it will lead to equity improvements."
The group hopes to include more nuanced" sociodemographic data - race, sexuality and Indigenous identity - in future phases of research.
Educators say they can use the information to support students in their academic journeys.
We want to have a better understanding of the students who are coming to us," said Cebert Adamson, vice-president of academics at Mohawk.
Adamson said they want to ensure all students are supported irrespective of where they're coming from."
The group is also urging the province to require schools to collect consistent data tied to the OEN, build a provincial database to store information about students throughout their academic careers and make the data available for research.
Karen Robson, McMaster University associate professor and Ontario Research Chair in Academic Achievement and At-Risk Youth, said the province could develop and share centralized data instead of making every community have to do all of this hard and frankly, unnecessary work."
In order to do evidence-based policy research, you need data ... from students," said Robson, who has written about the challenges of conducting education research. It's absolutely astounding to people that aren't from Canada when they hear about how we don't have that information."
Kate McCullough is an education reporter at The Spectator. kmccullough@thespec.com