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

Taxonomy

The entities, classes and attributes in the Data Model are organized into a taxonomy. As illustrated below, entities (marked with E) are organized into classes and subclasses (marked with C). Each entity has its own set of attributes (marked with A). Entities are grouped together based upon common characteristics.

Taxonomy Picture Taxonomy Legend

Taxonomies arrange items into categories based on like characteristics. For example, lesson plan and unit plan are both types of academic plans in the Data Model, but lesson plan and unit plan differ based upon the scope and purpose of the plan. The “is a type of” organization scheme ensures, with few exceptions, that each entity has one, and only one, place in the arrangement. For example, in the Data Model,

a portfolio is a type of formative assessment is a type of assessment is a type of instruction artifact.

Just like in the Linnaean taxonomy of living things,

a homo sapien is a type of hominidae is a type of primate is a type of mammal is a type of chordate is a type of animal.

There are exceptions and hard-to-classify cases, similar to the duck-billed platypus in the taxonomy of living things, which, as a mammal that lays eggs, defies a clean classification.

The Data Model taxonomy is similar in form and function to other well-known taxonomies, such as the Linnaean taxonomy of living things discussed above or historically used classification systems such as the Dewey Decimal system. As one becomes familiar with the structure of the taxonomy, locating a particular entity becomes easy. In addition, the provided tools for using the Data Model have search features that provide convenient means for locating items in the taxonomy.