Assessment reporting on student performance - driving real-time instructional decisions (CAR)
The Problem
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Teachers use formative assessments to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or course. They use the results from this type of assessment to make decisions. For the longest time, Schoology LMS allowed teachers to assign formative evaluations through the platform, but teachers did not receive any kind of reporting back, only grades.
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There are other legacy tools in the platform that provide a limited amount of reporting but those are not ideal for formative assessments. Also, the company is trying to move away from adding features to outdated tools.
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Due to the lack of reporting and flexibility, a lot of teachers use other apps to assign formative assessments.
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Teachers who are using other apps for formative assessments have to manually enter the grades into Schoology, which is a tedious and slow process.
Old legacy reporting tool
My Role
I assisted in the research and led the UI design effort and implementation. Worked collaboratively with lead product manager, lead product designer, and development team to ensure that quality and consistency was met.
Main Responsibilities
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Research Assistant
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Interaction details development
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Visual Design (UI)
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Implementation Support
Research
What we wanted to learn
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What is the most important information that teachers need in order to make decisions in classroom?
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What kind of data would make teachers use Schoology for formative assessments?
Methodologies
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Review of support ticket
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Remote discovery user interviews (3 total sessions)
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Conference discovery user interviews (7 total sessions)
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Optimal Workshop discovery and usability testing
Research scripts and unmoderated usability testing questionnaire
What we learned?
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Teachers want to know the overall performance of the class, but in most cases teachers care about the outliers, both negative and positive. This report helps teachers better understand which students need extra support or which students are ready for more advanced materials.
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Teachers want to use formative assessments at the beginning of the class, so they can decide what to teach during the lesson or unit. Because of that, providing real-time reporting is crucial.
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Teachers care about scores and also about the distribution of the students by learning objectives.
Concepts & Testing
Unmoderated user testing via Optimal Workshop and 7 moderated usability sessions were used to validate our concepts.
Concept exploration and iterations
Visual Design
I led the visual design exploration and final project implementation making sure to solve for all responsive breakpoints. A library was used for the box and whisker plot and styled to match the Schoology design system brand.
Box and Whisker Plot
Outlier Hover States
First Release
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It was important to make sure that we provided a way for teachers to see the overall performance of the class, but more importantly to let teachers know which students were outliers, both negative and positive.
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We also wanted to make sure there was an easy way for teachers to digest student data (sortable data table) in order to better provide support to those students either struggling, or ahead of the curve.
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Real-time reporting so teachers can accurately assess their classrooms knowledge of certain subject areas. This is important as it informs the areas of teaching that need to be addressed or retaught, or if they're able to move forward.
Final design concept
Final Deliverables
