Validation Process: Messages and Error Resolution
Once you submit data from your SIS (student information system) to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), the data will be analyzed for accuracy through a validation cycle where business rules are applied to your data and processed by DPI. Depending on the quality of the data, validation messages are generated to give you feedback on data that needs review and/or correction.
Validation Cycles
Validation cycles run through all data submitted to DPI each night. Users can also trigger manual validation by pushing Queue Import & Validation in the WISEdata Portal.
If you wish to be notified when the validation cycle finishes, before you push the Queue Import & Validation button, first check the box to receive an email. Your contact email will default into the email address box but can be edited.
It’s important to note that marking this checkbox for email notification is only for this manual validation, not all validations and not for nightly system-wide validations.
Once you trigger a manual validation by pushing Queue Import & Validation in the WISEdata Portal, data you sent to DPI will await validation in a line of other districts’ data cycling through and awaiting validation. This means triggering manual validation could evaluate your data immediately or not for several hours, depending on how many other schools'/districts' data are in line before yours. For this reason, please only trigger manual validation when you have made substantial modifications, not just one or two student updates.
L1 & L2 Validations
There are two levels of validation rules at work when your data undergoes the business rule calculations and logic evaluation. Certain validation rules may reject your data before it can be stored in our data warehouse and will send you a validation message soon after you push (send) the data to DPI. These are called Level 1 (L1) validations. Other rules will only evaluate your data once it has made it into the WISEdata data warehouse, though this does not mean your data is correct, only that it made it past the L1 validation check.
The second round of validations that happen during validation cycles are called Level 2 (L2) validations. You will see many more of these types of messages when reviewing data in the WISEdata Portal.
Validation Message Types
A Validation Message Summary will appear in the WISEdata Portal for at-a-glance metrics review. You will see total counts of each message type, as well as a donut visual.
Though validations display in the WISEdata Portal, all modifications to the data will happen in your SIS. The only exception may be demographic changes in WISEid. Every validation message will have a message code, a description, and a type. WISEdata uses three message types to assist users in data quality review:
Critical Errors: These are errors that must be corrected before your data can be accepted and moved over to WISEdash for Districts, which is a crucial step prior to a snapshot, as snapshot data is captured from WISEdash. You will see a red icon in the WISEdata Portal next to critical errors.
Error: Error messages flag incorrect data. To clear these messages, edit the flagged record in your local SIS to correct the issue.
Warning: Warning messages flag questionable data. Warnings will display as acknowledged and unacknowledged. Please review the data to see if it is accurate or needs correction. If necessary, correct the data in your local SIS to clear the message, or if the data has been reviewed as correctly reported, acknowledge the warning to ignore the message.
Business rules that create error messages often validate data across the state, so you may need to work with other school districts/schools to fully understand and correct the issue.
To view all the validations and related information about them, see the WISEdata Validation Rules.
Reviewing Data
DPI recommends that staff monitor validation messages by using the WISEdata Portal frequently. Correcting data is often easiest when the transaction flagged by DPI business rules occurred recently. If you are part of a large agency, daily monitoring and correction may be required. Even in smaller agencies, reviewing and updating data weekly at a minimum is good practice.
Using Filters to Review Data
The WISEdata Portal metrics will display validation statuses at a glance, but you can also filter your data to review the accuracy of your data or to find data with a particular message type associated. Filter your data by selecting different menu items in the Filters section, such as School Year, School, and WISEid.
For warnings, you can filter by either Acknowledge or Unacknowledged status before searching. Unacknowledged ones still need review, while acknowledged ones have already been checked as reviewed by a user. While you can filter out acknowledged warnings when reviewing validations, acknowledged warnings will still remain in the system for reference.
Decoding Messages
Click Expand All to expand the messages or click the far left plus sign to see the students associated with the error. Click the black ‘i’ to provide more details of the error message.
Click Collapse All to reduce the message display again.
When the messages are expanded, clicking the blue Error KBA hyperlink will bring you to help documentation about this error and clicking Details will open additional student information.
Once you click Details, a new window will open to provide you with the student’s record specifics, so you can view which data has been submitted for the student in question. Review the Student Details screen to determine if you need to correct any of the data.