eScholar, the nation’s leading provider of K-12 longitudinal data systems, introduces the eScholar Complete Data Warehouse Version 8.0, a major release of the powerful system for analyzing and reporting data.  Enhancements have been made to every component of the product – every table and every data loading process.  With the addition of more than 280 new fields, Version 8.0 vastly expands the possibilities for using data, enabling educators to gain access to the information they need.

Highlights of Version 8.0 include:

• Enhanced error processing reduces the elapsed time needed to make clean data available:  Error checking is now performed in a single pass where possible, reducing the number of cycles it may take to successfully load clean, integrated data.  The error log files produced have been standardized and simplified, making it easier to understand the cause of errors and potentially decreasing the amount of time needed to correct the errors.  Both features make data available for reporting more quickly.

• New capabilities to report on Staff Certification: Clients now can define the certifications required to hold specific assignments and teach specific courses. This allows the client to easily track licensing discrepancies in order to maximize the deployment of resources and minimize any negative impact on student performance and state and federal money available.

• Support for Assessment Accommodation and Modification details: In addition to identifying when students took an assessment under special conditions, it is now possible to track the specific accommodations and modifications used by each student, allowing for a richer set of analyses.

• Support for Student GPA details: In addition to associating a single GPA value with a student, it is now possible to track marking period and cumulative GPA details for each student, for any number of different GPA calculations defined by the client.

• New data elements add detail and flexibility: All existing data domains have new attributes that can be collected and analyzed.  In particular, the Course, Location, and Special Education domains have significant new attributes available.

• Space and storage improvements: Character columns have been changed to variable length where possible; this saves a significant amount of space and reduces the cost of storage.

• Improved support for State clients:   Several features have been added specifically for state-level clients, including the ability to define a single set of lookup values for the entire state, improved support for Adequate Yearly progress (AYP) calculations and support for the US Education Department’s EDEN initiative.