You have been assigned to a group and your job is to develop a relational database that can store, manipulate and report on student information for an average-sized school. (Whether it is elementary, middle school or high school is your choice.)  This information will include primarily demographics and ITBS scores (NPR). You are creating a tool for teachers and administrators to use to identify how well students are achieving (by class and/or grade level) and where they need remediation to improve their outcome.

Let's begin by identifying the requirements for your final database:

Database Requirements: Your database must be able to store, manipulate and provide the following information:

• At least 2 grade levels (e.g., 3rd and 4th grade) with at least 2 classes per grade. Each class must have at least 20 students. You can enter your own data or you can download a file of sample data. This file contains over 30 fields for over 11,000 students.
  DO NOT PRINT THIS FILE. It will print over 500 pages!! You might want to select specific student records from the file and delete the rest. Once you have identified the records and fields that you want to use, you might be able to find a way to import the data into Access.

  Sample Data File (itbsdata.xls.zip)

  After downloading the zip file to your computer, right-click (or control-click) the file to "Extract All" the files to create a new folder entitled "itbsdata.xls"

• Demographic information:  student number, first name, last name, class, free lunch, ethnicity, and gender (additional information fields may be included if you believe it will be useful)           
• ITBS scores: (Use the National Percentile Ratings (NPR) only)
• Reading, Math, Science
• Reports of students by scores in each of the three subject NPRs.
• at/below the 40th percentile
• at/above the 80th percentile
• Demographic and test scores disaggregated by:
• Gender, Ethnicity, and Free and Reduced Lunch (SES)
• Longitudinal comparisons of data over 2 years.  (This means that you will have to create data for one other year.)           
• Able to produce reports that will demonstrate the answers of the teachers/administrators who will be using this data.

You need to go through this development process using the same thought processes that you have used for your Personal and Expanded Personal Databases.

Begin by answering these questions as a group.  You might want to do this as a group using a wiki that Dr. Z has created for you. Go to http://zeitz.wikispaces.com (look in left column.)

Define the Problem:  Begin by identifying the problems that you are trying to solve through creating your database.  BE SPECIFIC!!! Identify SPECIFIC questions that you want to answer using your database.  Identify the SPECIFIC reports that you will need to generate to answer your questions.

Identify the Tables and Fields:  What tables and fields will be needed to answer your questions?

Coordinate Your Tables and Fields: Develop your one-to-many relationships.  How will this all fit together? 

Define Your Forms: Having identified your fields and relationships, you must now define the forms that you will need to make this database accessible and productive. Remember that forms are used for entering information as well as displaying information.

Identify Your Queries:  What queries need to be created to answer the questions? Don't know which questions your teachers and administrators will be asking?  Can you make the queries customizable to allow for varied input?

Structure Your Reports: What reports need to be provided to answer the questions? 

Possible Enhancements:

While these are not requirements, they are suggestions for how you might enhance your databases to increase the ease of the interface, their accessibility, and maybe even a graphic representation of the data.

• Create buttons that can be used to select pre-created queries.          
• Post database on the web to increase accessibility.
• Provide graphic representation of the data in the form of a graph.

Printed:

Electronic (in WebCT Dropbox):

Final Project Database Rubric (.pdf)

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Last updated 11/30/06 by Leigh Zeitz