With part shortages causing issues at more than 50% of all manufacturers, it’s no surprise that they are looking for better ways to predict where supply issues might crop up. Even the top manufacturing companies need better, data-driven techniques to help them stay ahead.
Are you using all the tools at your disposal to optimize production and improve your manufacturing supply chain?
The article below explains how applying Monte Carlo simulation in manufacturing contexts can help you see all possible scenarios which help develop process improvements – saving time, money, and stress. Read on to learn the role of predictive manufacturing analysis and what it can do for you.
Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) is a method of predicting the most likely outcomes from running thousands of possible scenarios with random variables. Such simulations use a series of probability percentages to work out how likely different outcomes are to occur. An analyst can run thousands of these simulations and derive conclusions about the future of their business.
The Monte Carlo method is not limited to assisting in finance, construction, and energy. Other areas, such as the manufacturing sector, can also benefit from its use. It acts as a critical tool for risk management and decision-making, helping people mitigate said risks that might have otherwise gone unforeseen.
Running these simulations results in more than a single outcome. The purpose of the Monte Carlo technique is to allow people to see probabilities of all possible outcomes coming to pass.
This is beneficial in a range of industries, especially in manufacturing where a single decision can be the difference between making a profit or taking a loss. Monte Carlo simulation is often used in manufacturing for supply chain and logistics optimization, forecasting, and pinpointing risks.
Read Monte Carlo Simulation 101 >>
With access to a Monte Carlo simulation's results, risk managers can:
Studies such as those by Farooq, S., Naseem, A., Ahmad, Y., et al. (2024) have shown that Monte Carlo simulation allows for "improved strategy for prioritizing risks." In their study, MCS discovered five times as many high-risk outcomes as conventional methods.
Such vital information can significantly help a company that wants to ensure its financial safety. For example, the results could inform a firm that while they’re likely to meet all production targets this quarter, they should also consider diversifying their strategies to brace for less optimistic performances in more severe recessions. Conclusions such as these mean businesses can take confident steps forward toward protecting their future.
When you plan to run Monte Carlo simulations, you should perform the following steps:
It is also imperative to make sure that the setup process uses accurate information to ensure the best results.
Begin by determining the factors that could impact your goal. Examples include:
You also want to consider the economic conditions of the business and worldwide. Consider:
For example, consider a manufacturing plant producing a new type of computer chip in an unstable economic climate. You might input factors such as machine efficiency and expected processing times, raw material availability, and worker productivity, to name just a few – each subject to its own set of uncertainties.
Monte Carlo doesn't provide a definitive answer but a vivid tapestry of likely scenarios by running multiple simulations and offering possible outcomes – allowing you to make an informed decision.
With the Monte Carlo method, input distributions are used instead of input variables to better model how inputs with significant uncertainty could behave and influence the simulation outcome. This method ensures the outcomes are more likely to predict what might occur in the real world.
You can also use historical data to ensure the most accurate simulation possible. This is not to say the future will proceed precisely as the past has, but it may help describe predictable patterns in your business.
You will also need to:
Taking these steps will give you more accurate results and can help you make better predictions.
With software such as @RISK, you can define these inputs, set your model's parameters, and watch as @RISK’s distribution graphs display the range of possibilities.
For example, Novelis, the world's largest aluminum-rolling and recycling company, relies on Monte Carlo simulation to help rank its R&D projects by risk.
Novelis recognized the need for an improved structure around the risk evaluation of projects. As such, they could not communicate which areas of the company presented the highest risk – vital information for all key stakeholders. The lack of information presented a significant danger to the potential ROI of each project and, in many cases, could have even led to major losses.
By using @RISK to analyze how each link in their production chain influenced one another, they could collect data on the risks present across all work within their company. They then iterated on processes and allocated resources to ensure manufacturing efficiency improvement.
Monte Carlo simulations can help you better manage risks and uncertainties in your business. The conclusions you draw from them can lead to better data-driven decision-making and an increased ability to overcome even significant challenges.
Lumivero offers user-friendly and efficient methods for running a Monte Carlo simulation in manufacturing with our @RISK and DecisionTools Suite analysis software. These tools allow you to run simulations on your datasets all within Microsoft Excel.
As you approach new manufacturing hurdles, consider the ways in which this timeless methodology, when coupled with the world’s leading risk analysis software @RISK and DecisionTools Suite, could revolutionize your approach to decision-making.
Request a demo or download a free trial of @RISK to learn more about how you can revolutionize your manufacturing process and help you prepare for the future, today.
In today’s fast-paced world, making well-informed decisions is crucial for business success. Markets fluctuate, customer behaviors shift, and countless external factors can impact outcomes in unpredictable ways. To navigate this complexity, businesses are increasingly turning to the Monte Carlo method — a sophisticated statistical technique originally developed in nuclear physics. By using random numbers from defined ranges and behaviors, like the normal distribution with its given parameters (mean and standard deviation), to simulate a wide range of possible scenarios, Monte Carlo simulations provide a robust framework for assessing risk, optimizing processes, and ultimately, enhancing decision-making in an unpredictable world.
In this article, we'll guide you through the basics of Monte Carlo simulations, help you understand the core concepts, walk through a Monte Carlo example model, and discuss how to make Monte Carlo simulation work for your business.
Income probability distribution created using Monte Carlo simulations in @RISK.
Monte Carlo simulations are a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. Essentially, they model the probability of different outcomes in a process that cannot easily be predicted due to the intervention of random variables. The term "Monte Carlo" is derived from the famous casino in Monaco, symbolizing the element of change involved in these calculations.
The process works by creating a mathematical model of a system or process, then running multiple simulations (often thousands or millions) with random input variables to see the range of possible outcomes. The results provide a comprehensive picture of the risks and uncertainties involved which can help businesses make more informed decisions. This approach also lets you conduct sensitivity analysis of your inputs to help determine which ones have the most impact on your results.
Several industries have successfully integrated Monte Carlo simulations into their decision-making processes.
Adopting Monte Carlo simulations in your business requires a combination of the right tools, expertise, and a clear understanding of your business objectives. Here’s how you can start:
@RISK Monte Carlo simulation model of demand using the Pert distribution function.
Simulate in the @RISK software interface to generate a probabilistic model showing all possible outcomes.
Final profit graph in @RISK showing the likelihood of all scenarios.
Final profit graph in @RISK showing the impact of the inputs demand and cost per chair on the results.
Monte Carlo simulations are a powerful tool that can transform the way businesses approach risk and decision-making. By providing a comprehensive view of possible outcomes, they enable companies to make more informed, data-driven decisions.
Whether you're looking to optimize costs, manage risk, or improve project management, incorporating Monte Carlo simulations into your business processes can lead to more strategic and successful outcomes. In an increasingly uncertain world, this approach offers a significant competitive advantage. Use @RISK and change your business results!
How do you update the qualitative research analysis software thousands of professionals rely on? With research, of course!
In episode 67 of Between the Data, host Dr. Stacy Penna dove deep into how Lumivero’s team of product managers and engineers developed NVivo 15. To explain the development process, Dr. Penna spoke with David Rubert, Senior Product Manager for NVivo and Citavi.
In this article, we’ll cover the highlights from their conversation, specifically the processes that led to NVivo 15’s new artificial intelligence (AI) integrations and Rubert's general philosophy for creating products that meet customer needs.
In working to create the next generation of NVivo, Rubert noted that his role as product manager is to deliver solutions for customers that don’t clash with the goals of the commercial side of the company.
“It’s one thing to solve a problem [for customers],” Rubert said. “It’s another thing to solve a problem in a way that it kind of creates business problems internally.”
For example, in considering whether and how to bring AI into NVivo, Rubert and his team had to ask themselves the following questions:
Their initial impression from customers was one of ambivalence to AI. Many academics seemed skeptical as to how it could support their work.
To better understand sentiment about AI, Rubert’s colleague Silvana Di Gregorio, Product Researcher Director, formed an AI Advisory Board by recruiting a range of NVivo customers to gauge their concerns and needs. Capturing and distilling this information required – you guessed it – qualitative analysis.
Rubert, Di Gregorio, and the rest of the Lumivero product development team conducted surveys and video interviews with AI Advisory Board members. Interviews included focus group-style sessions and individual breakout sessions. Using NVivo 14, the Lumivero team stored these conversations, coded them, and began to identify themes and concerns the customers had with NVivo 14, as well as with any potential integration with AI.
The next step was to extend their research to the sales and support teams. From the sales team, the team learned that some of Lumivero’s competitors had adopted AI early – prompting some customers to switch products. It’s important to note that they also learned that some of these early adopters had integrated AI poorly – prompting other customers to switch to Lumivero.
The team also gathered insights from customer support, training team members, and various Lumivero partner organizations.
“Quite frankly, they’ll let you know if your last version that came out didn’t quite hit the mark,” Rubert said. “It’s good to learn that, not just skate along thinking it went fantastic.”
It’s one thing to capture what customers want. It’s another thing to implement features that meet those needs.
“The customer is not always right,” explained Rubert. “They’re always right if you’re looking for their desired outcomes,” or what they want in a product. When it comes to how to make that product better, however, the customer is not usually the best resource to consult. That’s where the importance of industry research comes in.
Rubert described his approach to research by repeating a remark attributed to the legendary hockey player Wayne Gretzky: “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it used to be.” This quote is about the importance of anticipating movements within your industry.
To accomplish this in product development, Rubert explained that he stays ahead of the puck through constant observation and note-taking. He tracks new developments in software, reads books, and attends conferences – not just software conferences, but qualitative research conferences, too.
Iteration is the next step – filtering customer needs and ideas for design into product development tools. Currently, the Lumivero team uses a tool called Product Board, which integrates with project management software. Tasks are constantly being aligned with prevailing themes in customer feedback – what Rubert called a “leaderboard” of feedback.
When a demo is ready, Rubert tries not to push the customers to focus on one particular feature. Instead, he simply asks them to give their feedback freely so that he can understand how they view the product, and not how he hopes they will view it.
Finally, Rubert shared two major pieces of advice for product managers. The first is that they should develop a deep understanding of the problem domain – that is, the entire set of challenges that your customer faces, plus the challenges faced by the people who rely on the work that they do.
For example, if a qualitative researcher can’t reliably analyze their interview data, how can the policymakers who rely on their research develop informed legislation proposals?
The second piece of advice is to learn how to communicate the same ideas about your products to different audiences. Using technical software jargon, for example, is probably not going to help a social scientist with no background in computer science understand what they can do with qualitative research software. Similarly, explaining the product as you would to a social scientist may not be useful when talking to a sales representative or member of the engineering team. Listening closely to the language of each stakeholder involved will help.
“Don’t speak with your voice,” Rubert said. “Speak with the voice of your customer.”
With additional coding features, the ability to search across projects, and the Lumivero AI Assistant, NVivo’s newest release has been built with input from qualitative researchers (and with qualitative product research) that make the best qualitative data analysis software* even better.
Interested in learning more about how the Lumivero team approached product development? Listen to the full podcast episode.
Want to see NVivo in action? Request a demo today!
*Source: Scopus Data Analysis 2024
We're thrilled to announce the release of NVivo 15, the latest version of Lumivero's most trusted qualitative data analysis (QDA) software*. This release is designed to revolutionize the way researchers analyze qualitative data, incorporating advanced Lumivero AI Assistant features and new tools that enhance efficiency across the board.
Driven by customer feedback, NVivo 15 addresses the growing need for more streamlined workflows and efficient qualitative research methods, ensuring researchers can achieve insightful and accurate results with greater ease and speed. With NVivo 15, researchers can organize and explore data from any source, visualize connections that are difficult to find manually, and use our Lumivero AI Assistant to start to dive into the details.
Continue reading to learn more about NVivo 15 or request a demo to see for yourself!
Contact us to learn how you can provide NVivo to all researchers at your college or university and be assured that they are using the most widely cited QDA software in the world.
The standout feature of NVivo 15 is its groundbreaking Lumivero AI Assistant. This powerful tool is designed to enhance data analysis efficiency and accuracy, giving researchers more time to focus on data analysis for their research project.
All your data stays your data when using NVivo 15’s Lumivero AI Assistant. Once the AI completes its task, the information is sent to your NVivo project and deleted from the local servers.
Working with qualitative data can be messy, but NVivo makes organizing your data a breeze. With NVivo, you can keep all your data organized and accessible, allowing you to pull out insights as needed for effective qualitative analysis. This organizational capability helps to maintain a clear mind and a focused research process, making it easier to manage complex data sets and ensure nothing is overlooked.
NVivo excels in providing deeper insights into your data. It gives a voice to every data point, enabling intricate comparisons not only among respondents but also their organizations or any unit under analysis. Cases, classifications, and attributes highlight differences and unexpected similarities, providing a richer understanding of your data.
For those not satisfied with one-dimensional analysis, NVivo’s crosstabs feature uncovers hidden patterns by contrasting differences among respondents. This tool for qualitative data analysis offers profound insights and clarity, and for those needing more statistical analysis, NVivo allows for exporting data to Lumivero’s XLSTAT. Additionally, NVivo offers the most comprehensive set of text analysis tools and coding queries, enabling you to cut your data in myriad ways to reveal hidden patterns and fresh insights.
As with all Lumivero solutions, NVivo 15 prioritizes data privacy and security. The Lumivero AI Assistant ensures that all your data remains secure throughout the analysis process. Once the AI completes its task, the information is securely sent to your NVivo project and deleted from local servers, preventing any data from residing on outside servers. This ensures that your data stays confidential and protected.
Beyond its innovative AI features, NVivo 15 excels in cross-platform compatibility, allowing seamless syncing of projects across Mac and Windows. This functionality goes beyond eliminating the file conversion process, enabling users to effortlessly open and manage projects on both operating systems.
With NVivo 15, users can not only open work on projects across both Mac and Windows with ease but also all Mac teams can use NVivo Collaboration Cloud. This ensures greater flexibility and productivity in their qualitative data analysis.
NVivo 15 is more than just an update; it's a revolution in qualitative data analysis. With the advanced Lumivero AI Assistant and user-centric enhancements, NVivo 15 empowers researchers to achieve more insightful and accurate results in less time. Embrace the future of qualitative data analysis with NVivo 15.
Need help choosing QDA software for your research? Request your free trial of NVivo 15 or request a free demo to see NVivo in action!
*(Scopus Database, NVivo citations compared with competitors 2010-2023)
The Veterans Health Administration (VHA), a part of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), is the largest healthcare system in the United States. As a system that serves more than 9 million patients, the VHA generates massive volumes of data – data that can be used to improve our understanding of various conditions and patient care practices. Dr. Shimrit Keddem is an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and a Core Investigator for the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP) at the VHA.* Her work for the VA is based at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz Medical Center in Philadelphia.
In episode 38 of NVivo’s Between the Data podcast, Dr. Keddem spoke to Dr. Stacy Penna about how qualitative and mixed methods research have contributed to patient-centered care at the VA. This article unpacks Dr. Keddem’s key insights about driving evidence-based healthcare practices through implementation science based on research data – and how to manage large, qualitative datasets using software for qualitative data analysis.
Patient-centered care is a philosophy of healthcare practice where the individual patient’s needs and desired health outcomes are at the center of every decision by practitioners. According to a 2017 New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst article, patient-centered care includes the following characteristics:
Dr. Keddem noted that patient-centered care is about 20 years old, and that adopting patient-centered care principles requires cultural shifts within healthcare systems. At the VHA, her research helps inform and improve this cultural shift.
“Patient-centered care is really important everywhere, not just at the VA,” she explained. “I think of it as sort of like meeting the patients where they are, and there are many different ways to do that.”
Much of Dr. Keddem’s research uses implementation science to translate research into practice. The National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines implementation science as “the study of methods to promote the adoption and integration of evidence-based practices, interventions, and policies into routine health care and public health settings.” In other words, when research indicates that a certain type of practice helps improve care, implementation science helps researchers and practitioners understand how best to put that practice to work in the real world.
“The VA is really one of the leaders in implementation science,” said Dr. Keddem. Implementation science is grounded in qualitative research which helps clinical directors and policymakers understand what the conditions are like for practitioners, and what barriers exist on the ground that might prevent successful implementation of a new practice.
Dr. Keddem gave the example of a randomized controlled trial that shows a specific type of interviewing technique in therapy which supports reduced addiction. Implementation science would look at what steps would need to be taken to incorporate that technique into existing practices. Dr. Keddem’s team would then help train practitioners who plan to implement the new technique on how to adapt their approach.
The practitioners can then provide feedback to her team on how the implementation went and what adjustments they had to make in the moment to make it work. In the case of the addiction counseling technique, this might look like having a nurse practitioner conduct the interview because a social worker or other counselor was not available.
“We'll sort of keep a back-and-forth channel of communication between us and who's implementing [the change],” Dr. Keddem explained. “The goal is to just make it as effective and…possible as it can be.”
At the VHA, Dr. Keddem is both an independent investigator and a qualitative methodologist. While she conducts her own research, she also collaborates with VHA staff and researchers in designing their studies, choosing their research methods, and helping them access the qualitative research software and other resources they need to do their work. She noted that while conducting research within the VHA looks similar to conducting research at Penn or another university, there is a key difference – the size of the VA network and the volume of data.
On the quantitative side, VA researchers can conduct electronic health record analyses on millions of patients. On the qualitative side, there are many surveys that collect data at the patient and facility level. One of these is the Survey of Healthcare Experiences of Patients (SHEP). The SHEP initiative is important for understanding patient-centered care. “It's about patient satisfaction and that's a big piece of patient-centered care,” explained Dr. Keddem.
VA researchers can also conduct their own qualitative research within the overall VA network which could include site visits, focus groups, and field observations. Dr. Keddem also noted how VA researchers can connect with scientists and policy researchers at facilities throughout the country to ask questions and collaborate. For her, putting a mixed methods research approach to work within this large system helps to “integrate the voices of our research participants [so] we know that our findings are sort of grounded in the experiences of our patients, our providers and our staff.”
Ultimately, said Dr. Keddem, research at the VA is rewarding and challenging because of its focus on driving better results for patients. “They really have an expectation that you have, as much as possible, an immediate impact on veterans.”
Dr. Penna called attention to two studies Dr. Keddem had published based on VA data: 2018’s “Improving Patient-Centered Care: How Clinical Staff Overcome Barriers to Patient Engagement at the VHA” and 2020’s “The Gears of Knowledge Translation: Process Evaluation of the Dissemination and Implementation of a Patient Engagement Toolkit.” Both these studies were “large and longitudinal,” in Dr. Penna’s words, and incorporated qualitative data from hundreds of interviews and site visits. Dr. Keddem explained how qualitative research software played a critical role in making these studies feasible.
First, she noted that because her research is focused on health services, there is a time limit involved – studies must be completed quickly to produce a result for patients.
“With these huge projects where we have literally hundreds of data points, I just don't think it would be possible to do what we do [without tools for qualitative data],” said Dr. Keddem. Given that her teams can vary from two to 10 people, the collaboration and sharing tools provided by qualitative data analysis software such as NVivo and NVivo Collaboration Cloud helps keep work organized and on track.
Learn how NVivo Collaboration Cloud can help improve your research team's experience by letting you securely share and analyze qualitative data in real-time across Windows and Mac operating systems.
Coding begins as soon as interviews are conducted, explained Dr. Keddem. “We don't wait until everything is transcribed, because you can imagine, with hundreds of interviews, that would be a major backlog.”
Her team will meet to collaboratively develop an initial codebook based on some sample transcripts, and then that codebook will be refined as more interviews come in. “The initial codebook is just a draft,” she added. “It's something that's going to need to be put to the test.”
Learn more about how to use NVivo Transcription for quick, accurate transcriptions of audio and video files.
Dr. Keddem gave an example of how qualitative research software helped her find insights within the data for her 2020 paper, “The Gears of Knowledge Translation: Process Evaluation of the Dissemination and Implementation of a Patient Engagement Toolkit.”
She and her colleagues, Dr. Judith Long and Dr. Rachel Werner, collected hundreds of interviews and field notes, “But we were interested in how people's responses on the qualitative interviews and our observations and so on differed by facility characteristics.”
Dr. Keddem and her team were able to classify each interview with a set of facility characteristics, such as whether the facility scored higher or lower on patient satisfaction rates based on SHEP data.
“Then we can miraculously let the software give us these matrices where we can see exactly the differences [among facilities] and how people responded to questions based on those characteristics,” said Dr. Keddem.
She also notes that performing qualitative data analysis with software helps strip out any biases researchers may have about what they expect to find going into their work. “I do think the software also helps us be less biased and less going with our gut feelings and more going by what's [in the data],” said Dr. Keddem.
Dr. Keddem continues to work on improving patient-centered care for veterans through implementation science. With support from a VA Health Services Career Development grant, she is currently carrying out a large multi-year research project looking at screening for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among women veterans.
While the project has multiple aims and is ongoing, one outcome so far has the potential to improve care. “Only about 22% of women under age 25 received the recommended testing for sexually transmitted infection,” Dr. Keddem explained.
Her team was able to recommend an implementation that could improve STI screening rates: a pop-up reminder box that appears in the patient health record when they are being seen by a practitioner. The VA Office of Women’s Health has begun to roll out the clinical reminder within its healthcare records.
“We have a long way to go, but it's an excellent outcome,” Dr. Keddem said. “It's very exciting to be part of work that directly interfaces with the clinical operations and outcomes in this way.”
Interested in hearing the full podcast episode? Listen to Between the Data.
Need help choosing QDA software? Request a free demo or free trial of NVivo, the most cited qualitative data analysis software solution**, or watch our on-demand webinars and tutorials today!
*The views expressed by Dr. Keddem in the podcast and in this article are her own, and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the Department of Veteran Affairs or the United States government.
**Source: Scopus Data Analysis 2024
We are excited to announce the latest version of DecisionTools Suite – designed with an unparalleled performance boost (4x faster calculations!) and a new, intuitive interface to help you amplify your insights.
Time is of the essence, and creating and re-creating a calendar or waiting on long calculation times can distract you from more important priorities. That’s why our latest updates are focused on eliminating these challenges – allowing you to work more efficiently and effectively.
Continue reading to learn more about DecisionTools Suite or request a demo to see for yourself!
See DecisionTools Suite in Action
With new peak performance enhancements and an efficient one-click calendar re-import, you can quickly check off tedious tasks and focus on strategic planning and execution.
While these enhancements are specific to Evolver and ScheduleRiskAnalysis (SRA), they work in harmony with the entire DecisionTools Suite in Microsoft Excel to help you structure complex decisions, make data-driven predictions, allocate limited resources, and make critical decisions with confidence.
What's New in Evolver and ScheduleRiskAnalysis?
Your time is a valuable, limited resource, so we’ve made it our mission to help you do more, faster. Upgrade to the latest version of DecisionTools Suite to take full advantage of these enhanced features in Evolver and ScheduleRiskAnalysis and start adding hours back into your day.
New to powerful risk and decision analysis? Request a free demo to see the new Evolver and ScheduleRiskAnalysis in action!
What does it take to turn a classroom, a school, or a university from struggling to stable? Dr. Jonathon Saphier, Founder and President of Research for Better Teaching in Acton, Mass., has been investigating that question for more than 50 years – first as a classroom teacher, then as an instructional coach and consultant. He recently hosted a Lumivero webinar, 50 Years of Lessons on Leadership for Teacher Development: What Teachers and Higher Ed Administrators Can Learn, to share key insights about turning schools into professional learning communities where educators can grow alongside their students.
Sponsored by Lumivero’s Sonia and Tevera student management software solutions, this webinar offered actionable insights for school district and higher education administrators alike. Watch the webinar or continue reading for the highlights from Dr. Saphier’s presentation.
Starting off, Dr. Saphier presented evidence that demonstrated the impact skillful teaching has on student achievement.
“It’s well-known that the expertise of the individual teacher is the most powerful influence,” Dr. Saphier explained.
However, the knowledge base required for effective teaching is also broader and more complex than many people recognize – even people who are educational professionals. Skillful teaching is more about understanding the content area or innate intelligence. It requires a wide set of competencies spanning organizational management, the ability to motivate, cultural competence, and more. Dr. Saphier pointed out that most of this knowledge base is not acquired during training. Instead, it’s acquired on the job.
Teachers can’t effectively develop their knowledge base without support from their administrative leaders. Evidence shows that administrative leadership also matters when it comes to student learning and achievement. In fact, according to Dr. Saphier, “there's a multiplying effect going on” when educational leaders focus on empowering high-expertise instruction.
“If I improve as a teacher, I'm going to influence the kids I have in my room, but if I [as an administrator] get all the teachers in my building to improve, then I'm influencing all of the kids,” said Dr. Saphier.
A 2021 study on the impact of principal effectiveness commissioned by the Wallace Foundation supports this, estimating that while an improvement in teacher performance affects an average of 21 students, an improvement in principal performance impacts 438 students. The study states that “if a school district could invest in improving the performance of just one adult in a school building, investing in the principal is likely the most efficient way to affect student achievement.” (p. 34)
Dr. Saphier explained that this improvement isn’t needed in operational management. “I'm not talking about budgets . . . what I'm talking about is what [an administrator] does to influence the expertise of the teachers for teaching in their building,” said Dr. Saphier.
Educational institutions at every level need to re-focus their priorities, explained Dr. Saphier. “We want to make every school a reliable engine for constant learning about high-expertise teaching.” When administrators see empowering high-quality teaching as their main role, they are really focusing on improving the single most important influence on student achievement. There are many levers of influence administrators can use to create an environment for effective teaching.
The first step administrators can take to support teachers is to create dedicated time and space for planning.
“When things are not going as we want them to in classroom, it often has an origin in the planning that went into the design of a lesson,” said Dr. Saphier.
Administrators need to schedule regular meetings for:
The key is to ensure that high-level instructional planning is focused on making decisions for the entire school or department, instead of “the independent duchy of English or the republic of mathematics, as sometimes happens with secondary school leadership teams,” said Dr. Saphier. Working with an instructional adviser or coach, if available, can help guide this type of decision-making.
The next step for administrators is to ensure they are regularly observing teachers, both in the classroom and during prep time. However, observing and providing feedback are skills that require development, even for administrators who have teaching experience.
“Because one was an effective teacher doesn't mean that one knows how to . . . put into words and give evidence-based feedback about what it is that you have observed,” said Dr. Saphier. This is where embedded professional development matters.
Educators at all levels engage in professional development days throughout the year. However, Dr. Saphier points out that “the main place people get better at their teaching is their own . . . workplace.” Professional development that’s delivered via seasonal, one-off workshops isn’t enough, he argued. Anything learned during a workshop or in-service must be followed up by administrators, instructional coaches, and teachers so that professional development becomes embedded in the life of the school.
Dr. Saphier played a clip featuring Principal Tara Gagnon who was able to take her struggling school to a high-performing one by focusing on empowering teachers. She explained that one step she took was to attend professional development workshops with her teachers.
“You wouldn’t ask anybody to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself,” said Principal Gagnon. Engaging in professional development alongside teachers demonstrated her commitment to better instruction. “They see oh, I'm not just top-down making demands. I want to be part of this because I can't wait to see where this takes us.”
Attending workshops is not just about sending a signal. It also ensures that administrators really understand what teachers will be working toward implementing in their classrooms. They can then ensure the skills covered in the workshop are followed up through planning and observation.
“When [educators] see the leader willing to be a learner and willing to be in dialogue about how it's going,” Dr. Saphier said, “that leader is demonstrating the importance of professional development. It is also part of fostering an adult professional culture in the institution.”
An adult professional culture is a workplace environment that fosters high performance through respect, constant learning, and interactions that build trust among colleagues. The foundation of a healthy adult professional culture is the attitude of the leader.
Over years of observing effective administrators and reviewing research findings, Dr. Saphier describes the ideal attitude as one of “vulnerable strength.” Leaders are vulnerable when they demonstrate that they, too, need to constantly learn and improve. They are strong when they consistently make decisions that empower constant learning and improvement.
Strong educational leaders make it possible for instructors to admit when they are stuck or struggling by ensuring that they will not be subject to sarcasm or harsh criticism. They foster deep collaboration among instructors that focuses on learning more about good teaching. They also encourage honest evaluation of student performance data to guide re-teaching and learning where necessary.
By consistently modeling a willingness to learn and improve, and by rewarding and acknowledging others who do the same, administrators gradually create a more open and collegial dynamic among teaching teams – in other words, an adult professional culture.
Dr. Saphier’s focus during the webinar was on the importance of re-focusing educational institutions on empowering high-performance teaching. He briefly mentioned the importance of using data for instructional improvement, but skillful use of data is a major focus for his organization.
On the Research for Better Teaching website, he stresses that data must be used in an environment of collaborative inquiry about assessing student learning and where improvement is needed – not as a tool for punishing or micro-managing instructors. He then offers four steps for making skillful use of performance data for assessment of student learning and driving instructional improvement to help students.
These four steps include:
When deployed within a strong adult professional culture, student performance data can be an important tool for driving constant improvement in teaching at any level of education.
Interested in learning more about creating a culture that supports high-expertise teaching? Watch the complete webinar with Dr. Saphier.
If you need help with using your data for formative and summative assessments to better support students, explore Lumivero’s solutions for educators! Sonia, a student placement software solution, and Tevera, an outcomes-based student assessment and field experience management platform, are designed to empower instructors and students while driving program improvement.
Your students spend hours of time and effort keeping track of all their hard-earned experience, and you and your faculty and external site supervisors invest as much time trying to maintain cohesive and collaborative support of student field experiences. But in the end, everyone is left with their own siloed jumble of in-progress and finalized files and folders, and trying to determine whose to go by can be a messy digital- and looseleaf-mess!
To facilitate a collaborative time tracking process, your students need to:
With spreadsheets and other individualized tracking tools, even that basic process can devolve into three disjointed steps that require a whole lot of manual effort.
What you need is a single tool that is so straightforward and efficient that you, your students, and their supervisors can focus on what’s most important: the placement experience itself.
Here’s where Tevera steps in with Student Activity and Time Tracking. In our all-in-one Timesheets workspace, students can:
Tevera–designed to be easily navigable, user intuitive, and functionally thorough–not only meets those core fundamentals, but exceeds them, elevating your student’s activity and time tracking:
Core Experience Tracking
Tevera works with universities to construct tracks that meet their programmatic needs. Our skilled experts can craft consistent and uniform tracks that are customizable to your program!
Programs often require their students to meet specific guidelines and criteria as they work toward their degrees such as total hours and minimum hours requirements. Students, faculty, and site supervisors can monitor progress toward these criteria in real time using the Track Progress Display, keeping everyone in the loop throughout the student’s field experience!
Forget passing paperwork back and forth! In Tevera, time entries and timesheets can be reviewed and approved by supervisors electronically.
Time reports can be generated to show the hours tracked by students over a specified timeframe. These reports can then be sent to reviewers (site supervisors and/or program faculty) for signature. Designated reviewers have the option to either approve or return timesheets back to students.
If a time report is returned to the student, they will receive a notification to make the necessary corrections and resubmit it for approval.
Once all reviewers have signed the final report, students are left with a PDF document that will be stored in Tevera for life, or downloaded and printed as needed, giving them permanent access to their earned experience hours for licensure or job applications.
You can choose from a number of time report formats to facilitate this process. See a full list of time reports that can be run in Tevera here!
For California universities, don’t worry! We didn’t forget about you—Tevera coordinates with universities to monitor Board of Behavioral Science (BBS) changes to licensure requirements, so you’ll always have access to up-to-date BBS reporting!
Tevera’s innovations to the core needs of experience tracking can already elevate some university programs, but Tevera strives to elevate all programs by including various efficiency features and entry sorting capabilities:
Streamlined Efficiency Features
Manual input of every entry into a log can be time consuming, but Tevera offers streamlined features to help provide efficiency to your student’s time tracking. Some of our efficiency features include:
As students complete their placement experiences, they may need to review their past time entries for various reasons. With Tevera’s Agenda View, students can not only display all of their past time entries but also sort those entries using various filter options. Tevera can filter time entries using a single or multiple filters including but not limited to:
With Tevera, you cannot only ensure that your students are fulfilling their activity and hours requirements, but you can also ensure that they are making the most of their placement experiences by removing the time, energy, and effort needed to document them.
Help your students make the most of their education by scheduling an overview with Tevera!
The phone calls, emails, paperwork, and negotiations are done! Your placement team has successfully placed all your students at external agencies for their practicum experiences in teaching education, social work, counseling education, and beyond. Now, they are gaining real-world experience under the supervision of qualified field instructors, but the work doesn’t stop here.
How can your program faculty remain connected to students and support their skill development while they are out in their placements? How can you ensure site supervisors provide high-quality feedback to students that helps improve their learning process? And how can you be sure each student in your program is meeting competency benchmarks, no matter how remote their placement?
With Lumivero, you can achieve all of this and more, guiding students toward their learning goals!
Your program faculty can’t be everywhere at once, but with smartphones and increasingly accessible recording devices, it’s never been easier for students to record their clinical experiences! With the right tools in place to assess student learning, this raw footage is rocket fuel for your students’ professional development – providing key insights into the formative and summative assessment process.
Tevera’s video assessment tool allows students to upload video recordings to an interactive platform that brings students, program faculty, and site supervisors together.
Once uploaded, students, program faculty, and site supervisors alike can review video footage and share actionable, time-stamped feedback, directly linked to the video.
Finally, program faculty and site supervisors can evaluate student competency development all in one place, so you can keep an eye on student progress across your entire program in real time!
For Students:
Hone skills and drive professional success with contextualized, actionable feedback from supervisors.
For Instructors and Placement Supervisors:
Provide insightful and actionable feedback on students’ authentic client interactions at any time and place.
For Program Administrators:
Have peace of mind that students are getting the most out of their placement experience with all the resources your program and their placement site have to offer – supporting both their formative and summative learning outcomes!
Tevera's video assessment tools not only enhance student learning through improved feedback but also streamline the supervisory processes – ensuring that educational programs can deliver high-quality, consistent, and scalable support to their students.
By integrating video assessment into practicum management tools, placement teams can ensure comprehensive, effective, and accessible assessments for all students – preparing them for successful careers in teaching education, social work, counseling ed, and more!
Combine Tevera’s video assessment feature with our complete suite of field experience and program outcomes solutions for unbeatable program management that help students achieve their learning objectives! Schedule a product overview with our team to learn more.
Academia has always had a complex relationship with emerging technology, as is evidenced by its stance on AI tools being used in the classroom and in research.
But students, teachers, and administrators are demanding more efficiency and collaboration across physical boundaries, and the benefits to technology are expansive for day-to-day placement tasks and reporting.
To help you scale and improve your program, we’ve outlined the seven functions that are essential to have in your student placement management tool.
We have the right student field placement tool to fit your needs! Contact us to start the conversation!
In any educational setting, the supervisor's role is crucial in ensuring that the field work experience runs smoothly as they not only supervise the daily operations but also play a key role in providing guidance to students and staff. With so much at stake, academic institutions need to have a digital system in place for tracking and monitoring the qualifications of their supervisors to ensure their program’s continued quality.
Learn more about the reasons why digital supervisor qualification tracking is necessary and how it can be easily and effectively implemented in education settings in this article.
Supervisor qualification tracking is essential to any educational institution for many reasons, and it’s becoming increasingly important to implement this type of monitoring to stay current and competitive in today’s environment.
One of the main reasons schools and institutions track supervisor qualification is to ensure compliance with regulations and maintain the standards of education set by governing bodies. By tracking professional staff certifications and qualifications in a given field, schools can rest assured they are meeting regulatory requirements and offering the high-quality education that students demand.
With this push to improve standards, educational settings are creating a culture of continuous learning and professional development which encourages professors, practitioners and supervisors, and other academic professionals to update their skills and knowledge – benefiting the students and promoting student learning and development.
But it’s crucial for educational institutions to implement this sort of tracking in an efficient and positive manner to promote these benefits across the organization. One way is to use digital program management software to track supervisor qualifications.
While the desire to improve supervisor qualification tracking is there, the implementation can prove tricky if a school’s administration is relying on outdated, clunky systems. The best practice is to use a digital supervisor qualification tracking tool designed to fit into your existing process.
The transition to a digital tracker necessitates careful stewardship to maximize the software’s program management benefits and integrate it seamlessly into the supervisory routine. Below are five easy steps your school or educational institution can take to implement supervisor qualification tracking.
1. Create a Centralized Database
The first step in implementing supervisor qualification tracking is to create a centralized database where all relevant information can be stored and accessed easily. Lumivero’s student placement management solutions are a great place to start.
2. Set Clear Criteria for Qualifications
Educational settings should have clear criteria for the qualifications and certifications required for each supervisor position. This will ensure consistency throughout the program and avoid any confusion or discrepancies.
3. Regularly Update Information
Regularly update information in the database, especially when supervisors acquire new qualifications or certifications. This will ensure that the information remains accurate and relevant.
4. Define Roles and Responsibilities
Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of supervisors in education and field work experience settings. This will help supervisors understand their duties and ensure that they are accountable for their part in the program.
5. Easy Access to Supervisor and Site Evaluations
Site and supervisor evaluations contain valuable insights on the safety of the practicum environment, quality of a supervisor’s instruction, learning opportunities, resource allocation, and more. This data helps to complete the picture – showing what a student’s actual experience is like at a specific placement site with their supervisor. By having these evaluations easily accessible within your student placement management software, you can quickly gain a holistic view of a supervisor’s qualification.
Supervisor qualification tracking is crucial for maintaining high standards of education as it can greatly improve a student’s educational program experience and ensure that the program’s quality is consistent for all students. Educational institutions need to prioritize this aspect of their operations to work towards creating a more efficient and effective system for tracking supervisor qualifications – made easy with digital tracking for a more modern, automated process!
As the world of education evolves, these digital tools will not be a choice but a necessity – an indispensable facet of the program administrator’s toolkit.
But how do you start implementing it effectively? That’s where Lumivero’s field experience management solutions can help! Learn how Lumivero’s solutions are delivering robust site tracking and qualifications management to universities of all sizes.
Accreditation management is a multi-faceted process that requires meticulous planning, systematic implementation, and ongoing oversight. Among the myriads of challenges faced by educational institutions during the accreditation process, two stand out as particularly daunting: Documentation & Evidence Gathering and Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI).
In this blog post, we’ll delve into these two critical areas, uncovering the challenges associated with them, offering viable solutions, and outlining how Tevera simplifies both.
Documentation and evidence gathering form the backbone of any accreditation process. This ensures that academic standards, policies, and processes within an institution are consistently upheld.
By compiling a comprehensive record of the institution’s practices, achievements, and areas of improvement, documentation serves as a testament to the institution’s commitment to maintaining the highest educational standards. Furthermore, it offers accrediting bodies a tangible insight into the institution’s operations, allowing them to assess its eligibility for accreditation.
Without proper documentation, it’s almost impossible to showcase an institution’s competencies and adherence to stipulated standards. Thus, comprehensive and accurate documentation stands as a non-negotiable pillar in the pursuit of accreditation.
Challenges to accreditation management, especially documentation management and continuous quality improvement, are numerous, but these three might be the toughest:
Volume & Complexity
Accreditation requires a vast amount of documentation, which can be overwhelming given the complexity of topics covered.
Cross-Departmental Coordination
Gathering evidence often involves liaising with various departments, making the task even more challenging.
Timeliness & Accuracy
Accreditation bodies demand not just volume but timely and accurate documentation, which institutions often find challenging to produce.
To address these challenges, a few solutions are often recommended by institutions that have successfully navigated their own accreditation processes:
Dedicate a CQI Team
A team solely focused on CQI can plan, execute, and measure quality improvement initiatives without being encumbered by day-to-day operations.
Institution-Wide Feedback Platforms
Utilizing technology to solicit feedback from students, faculty, and other stakeholders can streamline the feedback process, ensuring that all voices are heard and considered.
Outcome Metrics & Dashboards
Developing specific metrics to measure the outcomes of CQI initiatives can be complemented with visual dashboards. This not only helps in internal monitoring but also provides tangible proof of improvement to accrediting bodies.
Tevera’s all-in-one education management platform simplifies documentation management and continual program improvement through a variety of interrelated features including:
Tevera’s flexible assessment structure allows you to track student performance on key program-wide assessment standards, including those mandated by an accrediting body or your program’s own specific KPIs.
Align assessment standards to rubric criteria and distribute assessment points across courses so that all faculty can assess student performance on relevant, demonstrable criteria, using a consistent rating scale
Importance of this Feature
Tevera allows you to design a consistent, repeatable strategy for measuring student performance and competency development across your program for reliable insights into program and student growth. With Tevera, you can easily align assessment standards to rubric criteria and distribute assessment points across courses so that all faculty can assess student performance on relevant, demonstrable criteria, using a consistent rating scale.
With Tevera, you can take a program wide view of your entire assessment strategy by viewing and exporting your assessment strategy, mapped out across all courses in your program.
Generate an assessment map report to review the assessment strategy that has been built into your program’s courses in Tevera.
Importance of this Feature
Reaffirm your assessment strategy and ensure all standards are evaluated appropriately throughout your program by viewing, exporting, and sharing your comprehensive assessment map.
Generate reports displaying student outcomes by individuals, classes, cohorts, specializations, and select demographic characteristics to analyze student performance on one specific assessment point or across a set of standards evaluated throughout the program.
Importance of this Feature
Gain insights to inform accreditation reports and continuous program improvement efforts by generating assessment outcome reports in a wide variety of formats.
Exporting key program data to a spreadsheet for deeper analysis is as simple as the click of a button. Click the export icon alongside any table in Tevera to automatically generate an Excel spreadsheet of the displayed data.
Importance of this Feature
Take Tevera’s insights with you anywhere, by easily exporting any data, such as documentation, user information, student timesheets, partnering site information, and more, at the click of a button.
Enable program faculty to evaluate student learning outcomes across the breadth of their coursework. Add key assignments and assessment rubrics to all core courses so that students can upload work samples and faculty can evaluate student outcomes aligned with student learning outcome targets.
Importance of this Feature
Foster a culture of reflection and improvement by incorporating outcomes-based-assessment into all core coursework throughout your program.
Organize your program’s data and documentation effortlessly and leave arduous record-keeping in your program’s past. Tevera’s intuitive data storage structure will ensure that your data and documents are automatically organized according to logical schema, making it easy for you to find, update, and export data any time you need it.
Importance of this Feature
Organize, update, store, and export data and documentation in an intuitive system, for thorough record-keeping and program management over time.
Tackling the challenges associated with accreditation management requires a mix of strategic planning, technology, and collaborative effort. Programs that invest in these areas are not only better prepared for the accreditation process but are also better equipped to offer superior educational experiences to their students.
Learn how Tevera can support you by scheduling a product overview for your team to review Tevera’s features and discuss your program’s requirements.
