The School-Wide Information System (SWIS™) is a web-based
software system for collecting and summarizing office
discipline referrals in schools. The system was developed by
University of Oregon faculty in collaboration with
elementary, middle (junior high) and high school personnel.
The purpose of SWIS™ is to provide schools with accurate,
efficient, practical information for decision-making about
school-wide discipline.
SWIS™ was developed to be an efficient, reliable and
confidential strategy for managing office-discipline
referral information. SWIS™ can be used (a) for internal
decision making as schools improve their discipline
practices, (b) for support plan design with individual
students and their families, (c) for reporting to district,
state and federal agencies about school outcomes, and (d) as
a method of collecting aggregated data across schools.
SWIS™ database is housed on a secure and dedicated server
at the University of Oregon, and is managed by a systems
operator employed by the Positive Behavioral Interventions
and Supports Technical Assistance Center projects at the
University.
Once a SWIS™ account is set up, the school staff enters
office discipline referrals onto a protected, web-space. The
data may be summarized to provide information about
individual students, groups of students, or the entire
student body over any specified time period. Both numerical
printouts, and graphs (histograms) are created for use in
decision-making. While SWIS™ is flexible and can be adapted
to the needs of individual schools, the major uses involve
monitoring (a) the number of office discipline referrals per
month, (b) the type of problem behaviors leading to office
referrals, (c) the locations of problem behavior events, (d)
problem behavior events by time of day, and (e) the students
contributing to office discipline referrals. The system uses
a menu-based data entry process that makes data entry and
report generation easy and efficient.
The data entered into SWIS™ are protected to ensure that
only approved individuals from the school may access the
database. Information about SWIS™ and opportunities for
adopting SWIS™ may be obtained by contacting one of the
following Project Directors: Rob Horner, Jeff Sprague, or
George Sugai.