Introducing Undergraduate Database Students to K-12 Education Research

Apps4VA is a bold initiative to improve K-12 education by leveraging data on Virginia public school students' progress toward college and career readiness. The goal of the project is for students, professionals, and the general public to create \apps" that explore new ways of using K-12 education data to aid in better data-driven decisions and intervention strategies. In Spring 2013, sixty students in a database systems course participated in a semester-long project based on Apps4VA. This paper describes our teaching experiences, reports our lessons learned working with education data, and documents improvements in student outcomes. We also describe how instructors of database and data analytics courses may partner with local governments to adopt similar projects in their communities.