SIF AssociationCCSSO

News & Updates

"The NEDM project has been very helpful in the ongoing expansion of the eScholar Complete Data Warehouse. By leveraging the work of the NEDM in finding commonality among education data attributes across disparate systems and organizations, we are able to more quickly deliver broadly applicable enhancements."
-Shawn Bay
 Founder/CEO, eScholar LLC

“What I’ve found helpful about working with NEDM is that it provides us with a starting point for our work to expand our data system. In New Jersey, we have multiple, fragmented data collections that grew over the years as independent entities. Our challenge is to build out our SLDS to incorporate what we’ve been collecting but also focus on what we may not have been collecting. NEDM is a fabulous tool to help us establish our priorities for which data elements and collections should be incorporated first and also to provide the more global guidance of what the data values and formats should be for each new data element.”
-Bari Anhalt Erlichson PhD
 Director Office of Research and Evaluation, New Jersey Department of Education

Attribute

An attribute is information about an entity that you can measure, classify, or describe. An attribute is not a calculation or statistic, and it generally does not contain counts.

Attributes in the Data Model are generally not generic measures or data elements that can connect to a number of entities. In the Data Model, each attribute is designed to be unique to the entity that it measures. Common Attributes are an exception to this rule.

Some examples of attributes include:

  • A measurement, current state, or a trait of an entity;
  • A person’s name, phone number, or IM address;
  • An education institution’s name, location, or size;
  • The date of a test administration, the value of an assessment score;
  • Lesson’s topic, grade level, or student’s learning style; or
  • A teacher’s self efficacy with respect to classroom management.