Parent Connect Zangle student information system

Zangle or Parent Connect is a system that allows the parent to check on the status of their child's grades as well as what is due and when an assignment is due. The purpose is to increase parental involvement and to reap the benefits that have long been assumed for increased parental involvement. This software is in use in several school districts today and is being considered by many more. What is needed is an examination of the software, what it does and how, and an assessment of how effective it has been in those situations where it is being used. Thus, a research project is to be designed to gather that sort of data and to set standards by which the software can be judged based on experience to date. A survey method is used to ascertain attitudes of teachers and parents to this system, and records on student performance will show how effective the system is in aiding students to do better work.

Introduction

Education today is in a state of change as the classroom at all levels adapts to the possibilities of new technology, especially computer technology, and to the benefits that might be attained by the use of educational software. Such software may mean new teaching methods, new ways of presenting material, and new possibilities for student interaction with the material. There are advantages to using teaching methods which involve project-based, problem-based, and inquiry-based learning, and technology in the classroom should be selected because it involves, promotes, and utilizes these types of learning in a system that engages the students in a different way. These three methods are related to the information processing approach and are seen as fitting well with technology-rich learning environments where the focus is not on the hardware and software, but on the learning experience. Technology in each case is used to facilitate learning, perhaps as a tool to organize ideas, to search for current information, or to present ideas. Project-based learning focuses on developing a product or a creation. Problem-based learning focuses on the process of solving a problem and acquiring knowledge. Inquiry-based learning is a student-centered, active approach that focuses on questioning, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

In addition to the software developed for teaching in the classroom is software that extends outside the classroom and that covers the educational experience in a broad way. One such creation is Zangle or Parent Connect, a system that is utilized in many high schools and that allows the parent to check on the status of their child's grades as well as what is due and when an assignment is due. This approach involves the parent more in the process and should also mean a student who pays more heed to what he or she should be learning and who follows through more immediately on assignments. This software is in use in several jurisdictions and is being considered by many more, and an examination of the software, what it does and how, should include how effective it has been shown to be in those situations where it is being used. To this end, a research project is to be designed to gather that sort of data and to set standards by which the software can be judged based on experience to date.

Purpose and Justification

The purpose of this project is to ascertain how effective the use of Zangle has been in improving educational performance for students in the schools where the software is used. Zangle ParentConnection offers several benefits that should be analyzed for their value and for how well the promise of the software is fulfilled. Investigating this question should lead to a decision as to whether to use this software or not, based on the benefits it provides and not those it merely promises. The benefits have been promised to parents, teachers, and students, and so the reality for all three groups should be considered in making this assessment. If the software is sown to be effective, then it should be considered for use in more schools and school districts. If it is not effective and does not confer benefits, then its use should be discontinued in favor of something that would be more effective.

Research Question

The research question to be considered is whether or not Zangle is effective and helps improve student performance while also engaging the parents more in the educational process. Presumably, either outcome would be of benefit to teachers, who must communicate with both students and parents and who also wants students to lean more effectively.

Hypothesis

It is hypothesized that Zangle serves its role as a means of drawing together the student, the teacher, and the parent by providing information to all three and by allowing communication among the three and that one result will be improved academic performance on the part of the students.

Definition of Terms

Zangle ParentConnection is a web application. It provides parents with read-only access to student data over the Internet. The system works by use of a confidential PIN number and password so parents can connect to the database for the school district and view data on their children's work in school. Among the data most commonly provided are progress reports, attendance records, homework assignments, report cards, transcripts, test history, cafeteria records, classroom news, and more. Schools decide on a track-by-track basis what student data will be viewable in the given database. The system is flexible enough to allow the parents to view data on all their enrolled children in the same district, across multiple school sites, and to do so in one sitting (Using Zangle ParentConnection, 2005, p. 3).

The PIN is a personal identification number, such as the PIN used for an ATM. This number is unique and is associated with a specific user name so that identification is possible to allow the user into the system while keeping out those who do not have business on the site.

Literature Review

Learning outcomes related to intellectual skills predominate in learning objectives. This type of learning is characterized by the application of rules to previously encountered examples. Through this approach, students learn how to apply knowledge to classroom examples, and how to transfer this knowledge to new situations, or problems. Problem solving is a major element of learning outcomes related to intellectual skills development.

Technology is not a panacea for correcting failures in teaching methods or other problems with students in class, but much new technology has been shaped and directed at improving performance and enhancing learning. Much of the literature on the impact of technology in secondary education centers on questions of what sort of technology to implement for the future.

This also involves an assessment of the technology already used to see if it should be purchased again. Tapang (2002), for instance, notes that schools have made significant investments in technology over the last decade by purchasing computers, networking tools and other necessary components to remain current and to integrate technology into teaching and learning. Among the aspects decision-makers have to consider are system performance and technology support staff, borrowing from the business world in order to develop criteria for making decisions:

Businesses face similar challenges. In the past decade, many companies have used total cost of ownership (TCO) methodology to analyze and manage technology investments and account for the value of these investments. TCO is a model that helps companies understand the direct and indirect costs associated with owning and using information technology hardware and software. This model may be replicated within school districts and higher education institutions to guide long-term technology investment decisions. It provides a way to account for all the "little costs" that go into acquiring, installing and managing computers, networks and applications. It also includes the costs involved in operating networks and computers, whether leased or owned (Tapang, 2002, p. 46).

Willis and Raines also note that the process involves a shift in educational goals and underling theory:

Education must move from the static, mechanical view of teacher as giver of knowledge to teacher/learner as integrator, guide, architect and facilitator. However, for this change to occur, educators must accept the computer and its software not as replacements for the content of the disciplines at the core of the curriculum, but as useful extensions that complement content (Willis & Raines, 2001, p. 54).

Systems that have been adopted have changed the way content is delivered and given students more possibilities for research. Some of these changes have been mandated, as in the Arizona case where specific requirements have been set forth in law:

The Arizona State Legislature has established minimum standards that every school in the state must meet by June 2003. Each classroom will have high-speed Internet access with content filtering for safety. In addition, every student will have an e-mail address and every teacher will have a Web site. After purchasing about 36,000 computers for $44.2 million, the next steps are to connect all the computers in each building on a LAN, connect the schools in each district on a WAN, and link the WAN to the Internet over a broadband connection. Free access for students and teachers will be available at school and home at any time (Charp, 2002, p. 10).

Schools have also been helped by funding from corporations of various types, many of which see the need for a workforce in the future that is fully adept at using the new information technology, or that has some stake in assuring that a well-trained public is developed. Companies focusing on engineering and mathematics offer computer help to students, and some programs are more far-reaching:

Also, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is donating $40 million to create small high schools across the United States to increase high school graduation and college attendance. Students will be able to earn both a high school diploma, and an associate's degree or two years of college credit. The effort includes the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In addition, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is planning to commit more than $345 million to schools and districts throughout the United States to create small schools and transfer large high schools into smaller learning communities. Technology is to play a key role in administration and instruction in these schools (Charp, 2002, p. 10).

As Wilson and Notar (2003) report, the United States has spent more than $19 billion to develop an information technology infrastructure in local school, districts and classrooms, so that now the number of schools connected to the Internet exceeds 90%, with the ratio of students to computers in most schools dropping to a low of 5:1 compared to a ratio of 26:1 a decade ago. However, the authors also point out that it is more important to measure the type of technology in use, and the problem is that most of the purchases have been at the low end so that the platforms purchased do not allow for the use of high quality software of the latest configurations. An added problem is that the teachers themselves are not as well-trained on this technology as they should be:

Whereas a majority of teachers now incorporate technology to perform administrative functions and classroom 'housekeeping', only 33% of K?12 teachers report that teacher training programs provided them with the training needed and that they feel inadequately prepared to integrate high quality digital content into their instruction (Wilson & Notar, 2003, p. 695).

An additional motivation for implementing new and better technology in education is seen in the passage in 2002 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a bi-partisan bill to provide additional federal money to schools, particularly those serving the needs of students from low-income families. Part of the law includes a requirement to test all students in grades 3-8 in reading and math. The bill also authorizes a good deal of needed research:

The U.S. Department of Education will conduct research on the conditions and practices under which educational technology is effective in increasing student achievement, and it will create a national education technology plan. As part of their application for funds under this act, states will submit a statewide long-range strategic educational technology plan that must address 15 components, many of which describe the proposed uses of the technology-related money. Among these uses are to raise student achievement, provide courses through distance learning, ensure teachers and administrators are technologically literate, and increase parental involvement (Fletcher, 2002, p. 56).

This technology has been and will continue to be utilized in a wide variety of teaching and administrative activities, including for instruction, for accessing data, for keeping records, for interconnecting schools and districts, for giving educators more control over the learning situation, for expanding the learning situation to reach outside the classroom both to find information elsewhere and to connect the student to the classroom even from home, and so on.

A report from the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory lays out the impact of parental involvement and finds that students with involved parents, no matter what their parents' income or background, are more likely to show the following characteristics:

They earn higher grades and test scores, and enroll in higher-level programs

They are more likely to be promoted, pass their classes, and earn credits

They attend school regularly

They have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school

They graduate and go on to post-secondary education (Henderson & Mapp, 2002). Other studies have suggested that the type of parental involvement is an important variable: "The effectiveness of parental involvement depends on type of involvement, ethnicity, family income, and home environment" (Okpala, Okpala, & Smith, 2001, p. 112).. Some studies consider the issue in terms of a specific skill and how it might be improved by parental involvement, such as reading (Hawes & Plourde, 2005, or Anderson, 2000) or writing (Beck, 2002).

The emphasis on parental involvement has been continued with assessments of certain technologies. The use of technology itself has been touted as a way of involving parents, as reported by Bessell, Sinagub, Lee, & Schumm (2003) with reference to a system called Family Tech used in South Florida:

In the FamilyTech program, computers were loaned to students for use at their homes, and computer instruction was provided as part of the students' school day. but, the program did not stop there. The FamilyTech program was also designed with computer training for parents as part of the intervention, which served multiple purposes (p. 7).

A technology similar to Zangle is described by Bird (2006) from a system used at Westside Community Schools, a school district in Omaha. This school is composed of more than 6,000 students attending 10 elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. The need has been to keep parents in touch with their child's academic performance, but the district faced the familiar obstacles of parents who wanted an update on their child but would have to call the principal's office or the teacher's direct line:

Parent-teacher conferences came too late to reverse a student's lack of progress. Parents of older students were offered few opportunities to stay involved (Bird, 2006, p. 38).

To address this issue, the district implemented Apple's PowerSchool, a Web-based SIS (student information system) that gives parents access to data on their child's attendance, grades, evaluations, and general activities. The students also have the same open access. The district first used the system better to manage reporting and assessment, scheduling, and grading. The school found that when it opened the external interface to the students and parents, the benefits were considerable:

Since the implementation of the SIS, attendance at Westside is better than ever, discipline reports are down, and, instead of declining test scores that are common in schools with similar demographics, test scores are consistently above the national average and among the highest in the state of Nebraska. School administrators attribute this in good part to the SIS (Bird, 2006, p. 39).

One reason cited for doing this is the large amount of research showing that parental involvement improves student achievement. In addition, the rise of the Internet has provided schools with an easier way to reach parents. Research shows that parental participation in schools tends to decrease as children grow older. Research from the U.S. Department of Education shows the schools often offer parents too few opportunities to stay involved in their child's later years. The student information system create an easily available channel of information and can help reduce any drop-off in parental involvement.

Another impetus comes from the requirements of No Child Left Behind law covering the parent's right to information about academic content. In the past, it was often left to the student to provide information to the parents about the details of school life, such as homework assignments. Today, the same parents can get this information directly on the Internet. Also, parents are able to become aware of issues as they develop instead of having to wait until a parent-teacher conference or the end of the semester, when it may be too late to make positive changes:

Regularly scheduled parent-teacher meetings have become more meaningful. Since parents are already caught up on the basic facts about their child's progress, they can talk substantively about furthering the child's learning (Bird, 2006, p. 40).

General reports on the use of Zangle can be found at a number of school districts using the system, such as Cabrillo Middle School in Ventura, California (http://www.ventura.k12.ca.us/cabrillo/id11.htm);the San Diego Unified School District in San Diego, California (www.sandi.net/zangle/);the Oak Park School District in Oak Park, Michigan (http://www.oakparkschools.org:443/zangle.htm);and other sites. Some of these locations report benefits from the use of Zangle, others state that they are examining the question and would solicit views on the effectiveness of the system, and others do not raise the question at all on their websites.

Methodology

The research design for this study will be exploratory in character, assessing the available data on how effective Zangle has been in improving the performance of students and enhancing their educational experience. Three groups are involved in Zangle and care to be considered in terms of how they experience its use, those groups being the students (who are assessed on the basis of improved performance), teachers, and parents. The latter two groups might show different behaviors as a result of this system, but it seems more evident that these two groups have to be assessed on the basis of how effective they believe Zangle is in facilitating communication and in achieving the long-held goal of involving parents more in the educational process and in giving parents the information they need to be more involved. Teachers can also report on whether they believe they are better able to effect change in student behavior because they can communicate directly with parents on an ongoing basis and so correct problems sooner than might have been true in the past.

The three greatest advantages of survey research are (a) versatility, (b) efficiency, and - generalizability. The four guiding principles underlie effective surveys are as follows: (a) a survey must be systematic (the planning and execution of the survey must assure appropriate content coverage and sound, efficient data collection; (b) a survey must be representative (the sampling procedure must assure that the characteristics of the research sample closely approximates the characteristics of the population from which it was drawn); - a survey must be objective (the data sought through the conduct of the survey must be observable and they must be capable of explicit measurement); and (d) a survey must be quantifiable (the data collected through the conduct of a survey must be amenable to expression in numerical terms). Surveys are dependent on the direct communication with persons possessing the characteristics or factors to be measured. Surveys, thus, are reactive in nature. There are five basic types of surveys -- survey of records, mailed questionnaire, telephone surveys, group interviews, and individual interviews. There are advantages and disadvantages associated with each type of survey. The trend in survey research is toward the use of the interview type.

A combination of types will be used to test the hypothesis in this study.

There are two different approaches -- group and individual -- to the conduct of interview survey. Objective and descriptive data from subjects are required in the conduct of many types of research studies. The use of surveys to collect such data is probably the most efficient of the various means available. The survey is also the most effective means of collecting objective data from subjects, because the responses can be without attribution (Isaac & Michael, 1996).

A survey is a process of collecting data from existing population units, with no particular control over factors that may affect the population characteristics of interest in the study. Six specific steps are involved in the planning of a survey. These steps are as follows: (a) clear and detailed statement of the problem to be investigated must be developed (the problem statement should clearly indicate what is to be determined by the conduct of the survey); (b) a decision must be made with respect to the number of subjects to be surveyed (the choice in this instance is between a census of the population of interest, or a sample of that population); - the framework of the survey must be designed (the survey must be designed to isolate the characteristic or characteristics of interest from other characteristics or factors); (d) the data must be collected and analyzed (this dual requirement involves the administration of the survey instrument, the tabulation of the data on the completed instruments, and the analysis of that data); (e) conclusions must be drawn from the results of the conduct of the survey (these conclusions must relate directly to the problem statement developed for the survey); and (f) the findings of the survey must be reported; this report should include a description of the problem investigated, the sampling design, the testing method, and inferences derived from the results and conclusions of the survey (Isaac & Michael, 1996).

A school district using Zangle will be selected and data gathered from the three groups in that jurisdiction. Data on student performance is to be gathered from records kept by the school system, accessing records before the implementation of the program and after implementation of the program to see what changes have been made.

For both teachers and parents, a survey method is to be used to gather data on attitudes toward the process, with parents and teachers reporting on whether the parents participate more now than in the past, with teachers reporting on whether their job is easier now than in the past, and with parents reporting on how they access this data and what they do with it. An appropriate questionnaire for each group will be written and used to gather data.

The hypothesis and any related hypotheses will be tested through the application of analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedures to the appropriate data sets. There are several statistical procedures which are used in the testing of hypotheses. Three procedures which are widely used are (1) ANOVA, (2) linear regression analysis, and (3) correlation analysis.

Analysis of variance is a statistical technique that assesses the effects of one or more categorical independent variables (factors), measured at any level upon a continuous dependent variable that is usually assumed to be measured at an interval level. In other words, an attempt is made to explain the movement in a dependent variable through the analysis of movements in independent, or explanatory, variables. The interval level requirement for measurement of the dependent variable means that an equality of interval exists between the points on the scale with which the variable is measured (Pfaffenberger & Patterson, 1997).