Bigger dashboards may not steer districts in right direction

Charles Taylor Kerchner

Lately I've been doing some musing about educational dashboards, the displays that schoolhouse districts and others are developing to provide quick indicators of success or failure.

The iconography, of course, is derived from the dashboards in our automobiles, and we understand the self-correcting nature of those indicators. People who don't heed the "tank empty" lite frequently find themselves over at the side of the road calling the service truck. Zipping past the dainty state patrol officer when the speedometer is pegged at 87 is probable to be expensive. Will this same kind of real-time information be useful in education? If then, what information should students, teachers, and parents get?

Riverside Unified's dashboard lets students know assignments that are missing and credits needed for graduation. Click to enlarge.

The Riverside Unified School District – a California leader in things digital – has created the five-indicator dashboard illustrated hither. A educatee and, peradventure more chiefly, his or her parents tin know whether assignments are missing or classes skipped. The California High School Exit Exam and credits earned toward graduation show upward in other gauges.

Vendors of what are called Learning Management Systems are developing dashboards similar crazy, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has built a powerful engine called ed-fi that sits backside the dashboard and connects it with school, district, state, and vendor systems. The State Board of Education recently raised the possibility of creating a dashboard for every school as part of the School Accountability Study Carte, or SARC, that is posted on every school website.

Meanwhile, as Frank Catalano reports on Mind/Shift, the Council of Land Schoolhouse Officers is hard at piece of work creating a multi-country Shared Learning Collaborative, a big-saucepan data warehouse that would be free to states and districts. They are likewise developing spigots for the buckets, apps that students and teachers could employ to get information out.

The dashboards and the engines behind them are linked to an supposition that ameliorate data will yield better schooling. Educators oftentimes find that a great deal of information is available in schools, but teachers and students seldom use information technology. At that place is stuff that teachers don't know about their students that arguably would help them – things such equally the blueprint of mistakes students make in solving math problems – and at that place are things that students should know to assist themselves, such as how to stay on the pathway to college.

Thus, it's easy to make a strong case for dashboards as important devices to feed back information to students and schools. Making complex data actionable ought to be 1 of the benefits of computer engineering for learning.

That said, the electric current crop of dashboards seem pretty limited, and overreliance on dashboard data can create horrible goal substitution in which turning all the dashboard lights green equates with learning or a good education. (There are besides bunches of privacy issues that I won't bargain with here.)

A better, less limited dashboard would be personalized. Data elements should work like Widgets or elements on a reckoner dwelling house page. A student who has passed the high school get out test and is aiming toward Cal or Harvey Mudd doesn't demand the CAHSEE icon staring him or her in the face. Let students get the gauges they need.

Nosotros do that with car dashboards. Even my seven-twelvemonth-old auto lets me change the displays, and as Claremont Graduate University alum Mark Maine, who knows a thing or two about cars, writes:

Racecars can both send and receive data … lots of data. For the driver, the instruments, including things similar shift lights, tell him/her almost their performance with detailed info on sector and lap times. They have this type of technology at the get-kart level all the mode up to Formula 1. In add-on, teams can monitor the auto'due south performance including tire pressure changes and share that info with the driver and then he or she is in abiding 2-style communication, like existent time OnStar. Finally, teams collect and analyze tons of data from unlike parts of the auto to improve the auto's setup for a item track and commuter. They also pay a bang-up bargain of attention to what the commuter has to say nigh the automobile's performance and track behavior.

Consider the elements of a racecar dashboard and the information system behind it. First, a bully bargain of data is analyzed in real time. Both the driver and the crew clarify and react to data. The crew customizes the automobile for each race and each driver. The crew listens advisedly to what the driver says about his or her experience. The information are useful because they are electric current, all parties know what to do with them, and the parts of the organisation communicate, both electronically and in person.

We have only begun to develop similar adaptive capacity with educational data. Thus, the get-go dashboard danger is that the information will exist irrelevant or static. If a dashboard doesn't substantially meliorate information flows from those available in sometime-fashioned report cards, it isn't worth the effort.

However, the greater danger in dashboards is that we might come up to confuse the variables they report with the goals of didactics. The goal of driving is non to keep from running out of gas, or to forbid the car from boiling over. Those are only weather condition for keeping the motorcar in motion. No one would confuse those indicators with a beautiful trip or a good driver.

When I was driving home from the part the other day I pulled upward behind a car whose license plate holder said "EXCUSE me for driving the speed limit." Actually, the driver was loping along at most iv mph under. I am sure the driver was pleased with all the green light indicators on his dashboard as he, oblivious to his environs, held up a line of traffic all the way through town.

It is highly probable that uncritical policy viewers and school administrators will engage in the aforementioned kind of goal substitution. Making all the indicators turn green is not the aforementioned equally learning. Just the improve we go at creating and customizing dashboards, the more proximate the two will exist.

Charles Taylor Kerchner is Research Professor in the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate Academy, and a specialist in educational organizations, educational policy, and teachers unions. In 2008, he and his colleagues completed a iv-year report of pedagogy reform of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The results of that inquiry tin be found in The Transformation of Swell American School Districts and in Learning from L.A.: Institutional Change in American Public Education, published by Harvard Education Printing. This cavalcade commencement appeared on his blog, Mindworkers.com. Readers with examples of existent-time indicator systems are requested to contact him there.

For previous commentaries that Charles Taylor Kerchner wrote for Thoughts on Public Education (TOP-ed.org) and for EdSource, go here.

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Source: https://edsource.org/2012/bigger-dashboards-may-not-steer-districts-in-right-direction/18248