Research firms Analytic Focus and Reveal Technologies have partnered with Chicago-based SPSS Inc. to help develop models that can predict student performance in grades K-12 based on current instructional methods used in a school. School districts in New York, Colorado, Minnesota and Alabama and Iowa will put in place the SPSS predictive analytics tools and participate in this new program, according to an SPSS announcement.

In addition, the Naperville, Ill., school district, located in the suburbs of Chicago, this summer has been training principals in its 21 schools how to use SPSS' predictive analytics software, said Alan Leis, superintendent of the Naperville Community Unit School District 203.

"No Child Left Behind [legislation] forces us to focus on individual student data and large groups by schools," Leis said. "[SPSS] will allow us to see which students are on a normal growth path and which students are below it - and to predict which students are most at risk for not meeting achievement standards."

The district began working with SPSS last year to build a master data warehouse that could pull together data from multiple separate databases containing test scores, demographic data and other information needed for predictive analysis, Leis added. This school year the district will begin using the software to analyze data and build growth plans for schools and the district's 19,000 students. The software will replace the time-consuming process of manually analyzing data from test score spreadsheets, Leis added.

"Now we can give [users] a CD with all this data on it so they can do the 'what if' analysis," he said. "It allows you to not spend all this time figuring out the data but '' figuring out what you did right and what you need to do better."