A model suggestion for developing national education data standards

Standards are structures that we encounter in many places in daily life, facilitating production and consumption processes and that are inevitably created and applied in almost every sector. In an environment where everything has standards, it is unthinkable that there are no data standards. In fact, today there are data standards used in many fields such as health, finance, transportation, and insurance. Education is one of the areas where data standards are used. Although there are various educational data standards used internationally, no comprehensive academic study has been found in this area. In our country, there is no academic or practical study on education data standards. The scope of this research is to propose a model for the establishment of education data standards and to fill the academic and practical gap in this field. When, the model which created as a result of this research is used in the development of education data standards; it is expected to contribute to the education system in subjects such as increasing data quality, developing interoperability applications, creating infrastructure for artificial intelligence applications such as educational data mining, machine learning, learning analytics, and correlating data collected under different systems. This research was conducted using the grounded theory model under the umbrella of qualitative research. The data that constituted the source of the research were collected from a participant group of 22 people working at the high school level in Istanbul, consisting of school principals, assistant principals, and teachers, through semi-structured interview forms and examining existing systems. The analysis of the obtained data through open, selective, and axial coding revealed findings on data collection, data use, data quality, interoperability, and data needs. The research findings showed that existing systems need improvement in terms of data collection, data use, and interoperability, and that data quality is low in human-dependent data, whereas the quality of data from different systems is high. Examining CEDS (Common Education Data Standards), A4L (Access for Learning), and Ed-Fi standards, which were considered within the scope of the examination of existing systems, it was found that education data standards include naming rules, data dictionaries, logical data models, interoperability protocols, and documentation. Based on the existing systems and the findings from the interviews, a six-stage Education Data Standardization Model (EDSM) was created.