Dr. Emily Oster and COVID-19 School Data Hub Launch New AI Public Service Tool, "Zelma"

A first of its kind public service application of AI, Zelma enables anyone to easily find, graph and understand U.S. school testing data and explore the impacts in communities across the country

PROVIDENCE, R.I., Dec. 6, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The COVID-19 School Data Hub, led by Dr. Emily Oster, Professor of Economics at Brown University, today released a new public service tool, Zelma Education. Zelma aims to make the data from state standardized assessments more widely accessible and engaging for the general public.

Every state participates in some form of standardized testing and is required to make those results publicly available. However, not all results are available online and none of the results are uniformly presented. For researchers, journalists, policymakers, educators, parents and more, the results of these tests can be very difficult to find, let alone understand without context. Zelma allows the user to compare data between different student subgroups such as gender or race/ethnicity within a state or school district, explore achievement gaps, or to compare district outcomes across subjects over time.

For nearly a year, Brown Professor Emily Oster and a team of 12 researchers tracked down all publicly-available assessment data from all 50 states and D.C. for students in Grades 3-8 – over 13,000 school districts – and codified the over 70 million data points to create a comprehensive, interactive, AI-powered U.S. state assessment data repository that allows users to submit queries (eg. "Compare ELA proficiency in North Carolina by race/ethnicity in 2023") to create visualized data in the form of charts and graphs. These charts and graphs created by Zelma aim to help visually answer questions that individuals may have about particular states, districts, or schools, and data files are available for anyone who wants to use the data itself for further exploration.

"Everybody, from elected state officials to educators and parents, should have access to information regarding their local school systems," said Dr. Emily Oster. "I'm very excited about the potential Zelma has to increase data literacy, improve our collective understanding of how our schools are performing, and inform how we continue to work to serve students nationwide."

For more information on Zelma, visit Zelma.ai. Additionally, all are invited to join a webinar today, December 6, 2023 at 1:00 pm ET for a presentation of the tool and an opportunity for questions. For more information on the COVID-19 School Data Hub, please visit covidschooldatahub.com.

Press Contact:
Joanna Rosholm, Original Strategies
[email protected]

SOURCE COVID-19 School Data Hub