001Hello and welcome. The Taper data download site has a new look and some exciting upgrades. As a reminder, these reports combine annual student performance data for every Texas school and district broken down by student groups along with other details making this a useful planning resource. In this video, we'll show you what's new and walk you through the updated interface. Many of these changes came from your feedback, so thank you for sharing. This input helps us improve and makes the site easier to use for everyone. Before we dive in, the new features apply to the 2023 to 2024 and the upcoming 2024 to 25 downloads. Older years have not been updated. Now, let's begin. In the previous interface, you'd select your download type from a set of categories and then you are directed to a separate
002web page. In this new version, your data selections are organized into steps like this, and they're displayed with drop-down menus like this. Once you select your school year in step one, in step two, you see the categories are the same as before. You can still download by district, by region, districts by region, or all districts. And then you'll keep moving through a series of steps to select your desired categories while staying on this same web page. So now we're on step three. In this example, we'll select region 13, Austin. Click next. And now on step four, you see the same alphabetical list of districts as before, but now with an improved layout. Instead of scrolling through a very long list, the campuses are now organized into two columns. For easier scanning, you still have the
003option to check all or uncheck all. Or you can also manually select just a few campuses. One optimized feature here is that now you can select all campuses within a district with just one click like this. You no longer need to select each campus individually because each district now has a select all button. We can also continue to use the feature to uncheck all. After we select a campus, we can click next. And on step five, you see the same list of selections as before, but now they're displayed again in two columns for better readability. In this example, we'll select all grades and click next. Step six shows us the same subcategories within all grades. You have the option to select all or uncheck all and choose individual categories. Next, on step seven, you select
004the type of report you want to view. A new feature here allows you to select all three numerators, denominators, rates, or any combination you prefer. In this example, we'll select all subjects approaches grade level rates and then we'll choose our downloaded format in step number eight. One change here is that the download types are now limited to either a CSV file or a text file. The Excel spreadsheet download option has been removed to improve the download speed. Since both formats are now textbased, this gives you a much faster download than before. The CSV file still opens in Excel and most users prefer that. So, we're going to select that here and click download data. Now your report should open in Excel. The download report looks similar to the old format. Rows two and rows three
005remain unchanged. The new feature here is row one. This row one is now your data dictionary. So your row one will tell you what each of these variables will mean. When you expand row one like this or like this, you see variable names and descriptions directly in the report. You no longer need to refer to a separate data dictionary to know what this means because now it's included in row one. [clears throat] If you still want to refer to the data dictionary, it's still available. You can return to our previous screen and select data dictionary at the top. However, the data dictionary that you will get will only apply to the subcategories you selected in step six. To view, we're going to click on data dictionary. And as you can see, the data dictionary also
006has an updated design. It's now a visual representation of the actual data report. The column order and the colors match the report, making it easier to find what you need. Another new feature here is that you can hover over a variable name to see more information like this. And you can do this for all of the variables. One last thing to note is that when we go back to our screen, each download will provide you data for the year that you selected. So if you change the year in step one, you will need to repeat the selections in the following steps. We hope this upgrade makes it easier to find everything you need in one place. These changes are thanks to your feedback. So thank you for sharing. To summarize the main changes here, you
007asked for more flexibility in data downloads. Now you can choose numerators, denominators, and rates or any combination for your report. You wanted faster downloads, so we streamlined the file types to speed things up. You requested an easier report read and a more user-friendly data dictionary. So reports now include definitions in the top row, eliminating the need to go back to the data dictionary. But the data dictionary is still available now in a more interactive format and tailored to your selections. So please do continue to reach out with feedback. Your input helps us improve to better meet your needs. For example, if you have feedback on missing variables, student groups, please reach out to us.