Summary: Data dashboards

We created an open source dashboard 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. Most displays of data in schools are one way only, from teacher to parent. We 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.

History

Greg Nadeau, Somerville resident, had already made an Excel spreadsheet the year before we began work on the dashboard. We did some handywork to get new data onto his spreadsheet and to consider the new "buckets" for data that needed to be displayed (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 initiative, was also interested in standard data display, particularly the administrative view and the ability to show data on afterschool programs.

We made Somerville's K-6 report card (typically handed out on paper) online, and added the ability for parents to write back to teachers, in their language, about their reactions.

Josh Wairi, a 5th grade teacher at the Healey, got interested in the dashboard design when we stopped by his classroom in xxxx; 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.

Communications made possible

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.

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.

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