Summary: Data dashboards

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Contents [hide]

   * 1 Summary
   * 2 Communication we set forth to improve
   * 3 Process
         o 3.1 Basic History
         o 3.2 Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!
   * 4 Findings/Endpoints
         o 4.1 Concrete communication improvements
         o 4.2 Main communication realizations and implementation realizations
         o 4.3 Technological how-tos
         o 4.4 Things we’d expand/do differently

EXTRA STUFF FOR JEDD/MICA TO CONSIDER/ADD IN

Teacher, parents, principal, and afterschool staff at the Healey School (K-8) have been working together to create a multilingual online dashboard for quick check-ins on student progress toward standard benchmarks. This includes an online family report card (that also supports tutors) and an administrator/teacher data view.

Parents typically do not see test scores and attendance on a regular basis. They can log into X2, the information system, but many don't have passwords or don't know they have them, or forget them.

Also, X2 doesn't show test score growth. Test scores are kept in chronological order and since students take many tests, it is hard for teachers to see growth on a single test from year to year.

The principal was never able to easily sort any of his data; it required sending queries to a central office and waiting to get charts returned.

Most tools for data display in schools cost districts a lot of money, and they aren't designed by educators or parents. Our open source dashboard is designed to help teachers, administrators, parents, and tutors communicate about students' progress toward standard benchmarks. The goal was to create a translated display easily understandable by an immigrant parent. We also wanted to make sure that parents could communicate back about data, to teachers -- and that tutors, teachers, and parents could over time communicate with one another. Most displays of data in schools are one way only, from teacher to parent.

What is the main communication improvement we made?

Our hope is that the OneVille Online Family Report Card can work to close crucial and persistent communication gaps among families, teachers, and afterschool providers. (LINK TO THE NEW VISIONS STUFF HERE, ETC., FROM THAT REPORT LAST SUMMER)

This dashboard – a free tool for schools -- presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments. In addition, unlike other one-way data displays, the tool provides a space for family, teacher, and providers to communicate about homework, long-term assignments, demonstration of skills, and social-emotional development. Google Translate assists with translation.

Viewers can message each other through the dashboard's comment/question boxes. Ideally, this allows parents, teachers, and afterschool staff to collaboratively set goals for student achievement, in partnership with students themselves.

Parents are encouraged to shape their conversation around Somerville's existing rubrics for student achievement, also making them more attuned to those rubrics.

We are working toward having teachers, tutors, and parents able to communicate on a running basis, with translation from Google. See this mockup: xx

main aha

holes in data = holes in student service

process info

Greg Nadeau, Somerville resident, had already made an Excel spreadsheet the year before we began work on the dashboard. We did some handywork (participant observation in data drudgery!) to get new data like afterschool enrollment onto his spreadsheet and to consider the new "fields" for data that needed to be created permanently in the district student information system (e.g., enrollment and attendance in afterschool programs, which such programs weren't keeping in Somerville's core data system, X2.) SomerPromise, the Mayor's new Children's Zone-like initiative, was also interested in standard data display, particularly the administrative view and the ability to show data on afterschool programs.

We built on tools already under construction in the District. We made Somerville's K-6 report card (typically handed out on paper) online and color-coded, and added the ability for parents to write back to teachers, in their language, about their reactions (we encouraged use of Google Translate to translate basic material in order to prompt further communications).

Josh Wairi, a 5th grade teacher at the Healey, got interested in the dashboard design when we stopped by his classroom in xxxx. Looking together at his computer and printouts, we realized he was already creating spreadsheets of student data from X2. He was interested in quickly displaying and sorting basic data, to supplement his face to face and phone conversations with students and parents.