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

Class

A class is, “A set, collection, group, or configuration containing members regarded as having certain attributes or traits in common; a kind or category.” To distinguish between entities and classes the Data Model uses a capital first letter in the names of classes while entity names begin with a lower-case letter. For example a Person is a class while a staffMember is an entity.

The figure below illustrates the relationships between the concepts. Entities, which identify what needs to be tracked by education systems, are organized into classes and sub-classes. Each entity may have attributes, which represent the measures are used to track the entity. In the Data Model, entities may relate to other entities.

Entity Picture