Data can be used to tell a coherent story that describes your educational needs and improvement progress. Data results, properly interpreted, can tell you about key performance aspects of your school and students, where to focus your efforts for improvement, and can describe what those efforts have yielded. In this area, you will find information and resources to help you examine data to more accurately assess your district or school programs and services and their impact on student achievement. You will be helped to: 1) organize and summarize demographic information about students, teachers, district, school and community, 2) identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in student achievement, 3) identify trends in student achievement over time, and 4) understand norm-referenced and criterion-referenced assessment scores.