Helios Education Attainment Decision Center 30007964

Helios Education Attainment Decision Center 30007964 Helios Education Attainment Decision Center The Decision Theater (DT) at ASU proposes a three-year, $2.5M investment to establish the Helios Education Attainment Decision Center (HEADC), a new academic center co-located at DT in Downtown Tempe, and built in partnership with Helios and a network of diverse stakeholders from Arizonas education and economic/business communities. The overarching goal of HEADC is to convene stakeholders, leveraging DTs expertise and infrastructure, in order to inform and facilitate discussion and decision-making on educational attainment in our state. Accordingly, we will co-create a comprehensive, scalable model of Arizonas pre-K through post-secondary education system, called EduSim, to provide a systems-level perspective on factors that influence educational attainment. EduSim will plug and play into DTs suite of state-of-the-art virtual decision-making tools, and will render in DTs seven-screen panoramic theaters, as well as remote sites. Upon completion of the Arizona project, EduSim will disseminate nationally through the Decision Center in Washington, D.C., followed by development and deployment in Florida. By providing real-time feedback on how policies, budget changes, and other interventions affect the complex educational environment, HEADC will empower decision makers to promote innovation in governance, improve educational outcomes for all students, and ultimately strengthen our economic competitiveness here in Arizona and nationally. The scope of a Helios-funded project includes the formation of HEADC, the development of relationships with stakeholders, research design, model development, deployment with decision-makers, intervention and impact measurement, and national dissemination. Activities beyond the grant period will include deployment of a Decision Theater and EduSim in Florida and other states. Helios Education Attainment Decision Center The Decision Center for Educational Excellence powered by proposes an infusion of resources to accelerate the Centers ability to extract, clean, and analyze data in order to quicken and broaden the scope of the Centers analysis of Arizona education data. Since its inception in 2018, the Center has begun mapping the entirety of the Arizona education system, from pre-k through employment, and has built a statewide understanding of high school-level outcomes and the factors that shape those outcomes. The Center has formed partnerships with many of the leading educational organizations in the state and seeks to enhance its ability to enable stakeholders to understand and improve the education system over the coming years. The Arizona Department of Education has an extensive longitudinal database of student-level data. However, due to resource constraints and competing priorities, they are limited in their ability to mine their data and conduct systematic research studies. The Decision Center has the ability and knowledge to be able to clean, organize and combine databases and to conduct thorough analyses of ADE data, but needs to increase its capacity to speed its efforts at ADE. This is a two-year request, aligning this with the initial Helios grant timeline. Additional funding will support data analysts, data scientists, student researchers and others who will accelerate the functionality of the Decision Center and the impact that it can have on the education system in the state.