Decision Mechanics have been working with Prism Decision Systems, LLC to design an early warning system for identifying high-school students who are at risk of dropping out.
The project was undertaken to demonstrate how an agile development approach could—in a matter of weeks, not years—deliver focused, actionable, real-time information to educational decision-makers at all levels. Drop-out prevention is only one of a number of problems that could be tackled using the same approach.
Successful application of agile practices within school systems lies, in part, on the availability of high quality data. As part of the development process, the team designed CohortML. CohortML provides a formal, general description of school cohorts, allowing numerous systems to be built on top of a single, well-defined data set and the potential for sharing applications across districts/states.
The early warning web application was developing using ASP.NET MVC 3 and SQL Server 2008 R2.
Prism Decision Systems’ article contains more information.
