Eventually, Leis said he hopes to expand the use of the software to the district's 1,200 teachers.

Phil Ashworth, coordinator of testing data for the Hamilton County school district in Chattanooga, Tenn., said he has been using SPSS predictive analytics software for several years to analyze testing data. A year ago, he added SPSS' Clementine data mining tool to the mix to provide a graphical representation of test scores from the district's 40,000 students.

The tool allows him to set up the parameters for analysis and to run a report and apply those parameters to any of the 80 schools in the district without having to rewrite any of the instructions, he said. In addition, while testing is commonly done in the spring, it is at the beginning of the school year that teachers need to know their students' strengths and weaknesses, Ashworth said. The SPSS tools allow him to provide testing data to each teacher at the beginning of the year, he said.