2021 Reports

Data Visualization, Dashboards, and Evidence Use in Schools: Data Collaborative Workshop Perspectives of Educators, Researchers, and Data Scientists

Bowers, Alex J.

Educators globally are continually encouraged to use data to inform instructional improvement in schools, yet while there have been many recent innovations in data visualization and data science, educators are rarely included in dashboard co-design. On December 5 and 6, 2019, the Education Data Analytics Collaborative Workshop was held at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City with approximately 80 participants. This workshop was part of the final phase of the collaborative National Science Foundation funded research project (#1560720) "Building Community and Capacity for Data-Intensive Evidence-Based Decision Making in Schools and Districts", a research practice partnership (RPP) on data use and evidence-based improvement cycles in collaboration with Nassau County Long Island BOCES (Board of Cooperative Education Services) and their 56 school districts in Nassau County Long Island, New York, USA. This edited book details the results from the workshop through 28 chapters from authors who were attendees, including educators, data scientists, and researchers. We aimed to achieve three goals through a collaborative workshop: (a) to bring educators together with data scientists in collaborative co-design to build conversation, workflows, visualizations, and pilot code; (b) to train educators and data scientists around data use in schools using the current data systems available and focusing on educator problems of practice; and (c) to publish open-access code as well as educator perceptions of this intersection of data use, visualization, and education data science to inform evidence-based improvement cycles for instructional improvement in schools.