Survey Data
Survey responses are kept confidential. Only researchers who have signed Confidentiality Agreements will know the identities of the respondents. Analysis will be reported in the aggregate with no school or district identifiers.
Class Lists
Survey responses will be analyzed with class and school level achievement data. To connect teachers with the students they teach, researchers may ask some schools to submit class lists that contain the student names and NWEA IDs associated with teachers who will take the survey. Schools will be instructed to submit class lists to a secure site.
Student Achievement Data
Student achievement data used for research purposes is maintained in NWEA's Growth Research Database (GRD). Information in the GRD is confidential and its use complies with federal privacy regulations.
Only NWEA researchers, NWEA-approved researchers and NWEA member districts who have signed NWEA's Confidentiality Agreements and who are conducting legitimate research are allowed to use the data contained in the GRD. The confidentiality of district, school and student data will always be protected and will not be released to persons not covered by the Agreement, or published. Individual student names and identifiers will never be given to researchers without written permission from the district in compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). The relevant policy from the Act appears below: Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record. However, FERPA allows schools to disclose those records, without consent, to the following parties or under the following conditions (34 CFR 99.31):
- School officials with legitimate educational interest;
- Other schools to which a student is transferring;
- Specified officials for audit or evaluation purposes;
- Appropriate parties in connection with financial aid to a student;
- Organizations conducting certain studies for or on behalf of the school;
- Accrediting organizations;
- To comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena;
- Appropriate officials in cases of health and safety emergencies; and
- State and local authorities, within a juvenile justice system, pursuant to specific State law.
Source: http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
FERPA, however, does not cover or protect the identities of specific schools, teachers and districts from disclosure. In general, data sets provided to external researchers do not contain identifiable codes for these entities. However, when researchers need to survey school staff or match to external data sets, names or identifiers may be provided. In these cases, researchers agree not to publish or divulge the identities of individual teachers, schools, or districts, except in accordance with state and federal law.
The following procedures are in place to protect student data:
- Student names are filtered from all datasets that are shared with external researchers.
- Researchers will never publish results that could be reasonably anticipated to lead to public disclosure of an individual student or teacher. When tabulations are produced, any table with a cell containing fewer than 5 cases will be re-categorized or not reported.
As part of the signed Confidentiality Agreements, external researchers agree that, if the identity of a student, teacher, or school is discovered inadvertently or otherwise becomes known, researchers will:
- Inform the NWEA GRD manager of this discovery,
- Safeguard or destroy this information as directed by the NWEA GRD manager,
- Neither use nor release the information.
