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Universal Mind Helps Change the Conversation About Educational Assessment
By bringing together user experience designers and Flash Platform developers, we were able to produce a powerful data visualization app that literally changes the conversation about educational assessment.
Challenge
The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) and the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment believe that having a better understanding of student performance and achievement over time is invaluable in providing the best educational environment for their students. So, after a decade of work to create new ways of measuring individual student growth, the CDE and the Center for Assessment introduced the “Colorado Growth Model,” a system for visualizing state assessment data that provides a revealing look at student progress. Instead of just examining how students perform today, it takes into account how they performed in previous years, measuring not just their individual achievement but also their rates of individual progress.
With the Colorado Growth Model, the CDE and Center for Assessment felt that they had created the right information for education stakeholders. However, the challenge was sharing it with teachers, principals and other educators within every district in the state, and in a consistent and easily viewable format. Instead, the state disseminated data in large flat files to each district requiring them to load, analyze, and present data on their own—a cumbersome process at best.
In order to meaningfully change conversations statewide, they needed an innovative and engaging way to enable educators to quickly understand and make use of this critical information.
Process
During the Discovery phase, Universal Mind worked with the client to establish a “strategic vision story” that highlighted the goals of the solution, taking into account who their users were. Then, during the Design phase, UM designers created a series of sketches and diagrams that helped everyone gain a common understanding. Tying feedback from CDE and users together, the team brought the application to life gradually, adding levels of fidelity without building out a lot of code. This enabled them to refine concepts affordably.
At the same time, during the Development phase, Universal Mind technologists worked with the User Experience team to take advantage of the technology without overreaching. Among other challenges, UM technologists ensured functionality of the application by tying it together with the backend and creating complex middle tier connections into the CDE data warehouse.
By adhering to Universal Mind’s clean design approach, the working solution was tested and handed off to CDE as a solution that was easy to maintain and expand for continued success down the road.
In July of 2009, CDE rolled out SchoolVIEW, the resulting application, to staff in 180 school districts responsible for educating over 600,000 students across the state of Colorado. Shortly thereafter, SchoolVIEW launched with 470,000 individual student performance reports to school districts for use by teachers and parents throughout the state.
Result
SchoolVIEW is a data visualization application that’s head and shoulders above what any other governmental education organization has been able to create. It enables education stakeholders to view the data most meaningful to them and turn that data into actionable information.
For example, administrators can look at “big picture” summary data for their district or school, while principals and teachers can focus on individual students and show parents key information about their child’s historical achievement and growth. In this way, SchoolVIEW cultivates productive conversations among stakeholders and enables them to make better decisions on where to invest in education.
The response in the Colorado educational community was phenomenal. Widespread support for SchoolVIEW has translated into a commitment from Colorado Governor Bill Ritter to invest $2.5 million of discretionary funds to ensure use by all of Colorado’s 180 school districts, more than 1,800 schools, and more than 25,000 teachers.
Universal Mind’s work with CDE also achieved finalist status for an Adobe MAX Award, establishing the state as a national leader in education. Universal Mind, The Center for Assessment, and the CDE have begun to share SchoolVIEW with other states and co-develop a multi-state platform that builds upon these early successes.
