May 29, 2025 By CDHD Conference presentation: American Evaluation Association Part of the CDHD mission is to create opportunities where all people can thrive within their communities. This is achieved through services in five key areas, including research, evaluation and sharing information. Late last year, Cari Murphy, PhD and Lily Robb travelled to Portland, Oregon to attend the American Evaluation Association Conference. This annual event brings together more than 2000 evaluation professionals from across the US to learn best practices, discover new techniques and implement lessons learned from their colleagues. The pair were representing the CDHD and Idaho SESTA in a presentation to educate and inform others on a new and innovative way to collect, store and access real-world educational data using Power BI. The Problem The SESTA project provides information, training and technical assistance services to school districts across the state. Internal evaluators for the Project would commonly hear things like, “Districts are really struggling with reading”, and as evaluators we would ask, “Who, how many, and to what degree?” Unfortunately, program staff did not have the data details to support their statements. The Project found that there were over 20 different spreadsheets stored in 11 different systems that contained relevant data, none of which had universal access. The goal was to create a single system that would: Allow evaluative statements to be grounded in actual data from multiple sources (ie IDEA indicator data, trainings attended, number of students with disabilities, etc). Ensure high data quality that could be used when making programmatic decisions that accurately reflected program needs. Offer a collaborative, evaluative approach that involved stakeholders in the evaluation. Empower project staff to use quality, real-world data to make decisions. The Solution The presentation demonstrated how SESTA used Microsoft Power BI to combine, analyze, visualize, and share interactive data across a variety of real-world data sets. Power BI is a widely available business analytics tool that can be used to produce interactive data visualizations and reports. Given that it can help users store and access data from various sources, and it is widely available, it presented a promising solution. SESTA was able to combine multiple data sources into a single dashboard that included student achievement data, child count data, school district fiscal data, special education indicator data, professional development participation and school district determination status. The end result not only provided a single source for data that is accessible to staff across disciplines and locations, but it also increased buy-in to not only use data but also incorporate more data to provide guided decision-making in addressing program needs. Resources Let the Data Speak presentation (PDF) Public District Data Dashboard (Power BI)