Create place or identify best practice to more flexibly store student indicators

Recently a discussion has emerged about places to hold student characteristics that are likely to be locally defined (locally here would include state elements with limited applicability to other states).

In part, this is motivated by the school closures and other disruption brought on by COVID-19, so part of the concern is also that even if there is applicability of some elements to other agencies, there may not be sufficient time for community governance to act to coordinate data elements and definitions. In other words, they may have broader applicability and standardize-ability, but there is insufficient time to do that work, so we have to assume that initial definitions are local, and we standardize over time.

These definitions also likely overlap with family indicators as well. That's a related aspect of this issue.

A few places have been suggested:

Create entirely new data fields to try to capture the important semantics. E.g. use the existing extensions system.

Example: introduce a field called “HomeInternetAccess” onto SEOA. The downside here is that the context is very volatile, and the extensions system is not.

Use StudentCharacteristics

The advantage here is that this element is descriptor, so the vocabulary is controlled - invalid values can be rejected, and analytics can count on certain local values being present. The disadvantage is that the is not a key-value structure, so that generates ambiguity – “does the student have none of the applicable states or has the field not been populated yet” is a question that is unanswerable.

Use StudentIndicator.

The advantage here is that this is a true key-value store. That does not fully resolve the ambiguity in #2, but it could help – now you can clearly flag “value empty”. However, the vocabulary is not controlled, so people and systems can stick in anything they want – i.e. more likely to have data quality issues. It seems it would be better if studentIndicator was a descriptor however.

Use the new survey domain, but in the sense of this is not a survey instrument, but a “aggregate survey” of student or home characteristics. The issue here is that survey is new and not proven.