Collaborative data dashboard design for school improvement

Purpose Traditional visualization approaches often fail because data scientists lack understanding of practitioner tasks, and educators lack data expertise, leading to poor tool adoption. This paper aims to offer insights from a mid-sized urban school district in the Northeastern USA, where a data dashboard designer collaborated with school administrators to develop a collective understanding of their data needs before designing visualizations. Design/methodology/approach The authors combined usage reports with data from one-on-one meetings with school principals and assistant principals, data leads and instructional leadership teams. They engaged in a qualitative case study focused on collaborative work around data dashboards, generating deductive codes based on patterns in meeting outputs and field notes. They used a Design-Based Research framework, drawing on frameworks from data visualization and human–computer interaction studies that articulate methods of data reconnaissance and task wrangling, including Crisan and Munzner (2019). Findings The outcome of this study is one example of a cycle of collaboration between researchers and practitioners, each bringing separate expertise to the data dashboard design process. By emphasizing user-voiced data needs, novel approaches to addressing equity emerged. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study serves as one of the first examples in K-12 education of a collaboratively developed set of data visualizations using user-experience and user-interface. This study uniquely focuses on school administrators, while most prior research has focused on teacher behavior. Finally, this study focuses on elementary and middle school leaders, while most data tool work has occurred within the context of high schools.