Portland, OR – Alma Student Information System (SIS) announces the release of Data Lab, Alma’s real-time insight and analytics tool. Powered by Ed-Fi analytic tables and Google Data Studio’s robust back-end tech, Data Lab comes equipped with out-of-the-box graphs and Alma-built data insights to track school operations and monitor emerging student patterns. Schools and districts are already accountable for daily data tracking for compliance purposes; using Data Lab to interpret this compliance and operations data can also help determine equitable and supportive interventions in real time.

Data Lab’s trackable metrics for attendance, discipline, and grading provide insight and highlight change over time. Administrators can interpret this data by signaling important indicators that help schools analyze and better identify student support needs and school function. “Alma’s mission focuses on building tools to support the greatest generation of students,” says Andrew Herman, Alma Co-Founder and CEO, “gathering and interpreting Data Lab’s insights brings a critical lens to the way schools view how they serve those students.”

With Data Lab, schools gain deeper insights from daily data they already collect, using it to take actionable steps towards improving student outcomes, addressing truancy and chronic absenteeism, establishing equitable discipline interventions, and much more.

The release of Data Lab bolsters Alma’s mission to increase educational equity and inclusion to foster positive change within schools and districts. Herman continues, “with Data Lab, staff can ask critical questions about how students are being served, how to replicate success, and assess system health by addressing trends as they happen within the school year.” This can include which populations of students are seeing which trends, what and where change is needed, how data insight can shape or reshape school policy, identifying support and resource allocation, and much more. Data Lab offers infinite ways to help educational leaders use data to see their school’s story unfold.

Data Lab’s comprehensive “plug and play” dashboards are available to a wide range of staff, from entire teams to specific members of leadership, providing full transparency and insight into student support needs. District leaders using Data Lab can view multiple schools to further enhance consistency and implement strategies for support. Administrators gain X-ray vision into the overall health of individual schools and districts, identifying pathways to address systemic and structural changes, and recreating successes. 

Through Google Data Studio, Ed-Fi analytic tables, and Alma’s highly intuitive SIS platform, Data Lab’s familiar data structure helps staff identify leading indicators in determining the health of their school. Data Lab highlights change over time, revealing the distribution of reasons to help create a more accessible and equitable approach to student success.