Improving Educational Standards Using Visualization Dashboards for Decision Making

Education is one of the most important predictors for success for young children around the world. In the United States, there have been significant movements and progress to advance education to foster the next generation of talent, as seen with legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act, and, more recently, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). As a way to provide the public with information and to create a convenient way to view, interpret, compare and contrast educational data, many states in the U.S. have created dashboards at different levels of government that encapsulate performance, along with environmental factors, such as income. These dashboards allow for public accountability and for individuals to see how well certain schools, districts, or areas are performing. By providing these visualizations to educators, principals, and lawmakers, people with authority and power to make meaningful change in K-12 education are better equipped to do so. Such dashboards can carry some unintended consequences, such as the possibility of incorrectly correlating performance with action. But when the underlying issues may be more systemic, for example, based on differences in demographics, these effects can be minimized by creating better quality dashboards that clearly depict demographics alongside performance metrics and outcomes. This paper is significant in reviewing education-specific dashboards and the need to build better dashboards, ensuring that benefits are achieved for a variety of stakeholders.