BACKGROUND
Attendance is vital to learning, however the abundance of noise contained within attendance data can make it difficult for school administrators to find the information they need to tell a clear concise story, especially if they are tracking across many different teachers, classes, and schools.
Improved technology can help administrators turn this daunting chaotic data into meaningful information. Under older technology systems it was difficult to share current up-to-date data in a way that anyone can use. Now, institutions are empowered to share data through Microsoft’s Power BI Dashboards. The following is an elegant and clear example of how complicated data from many different class rooms, teachers, and schools can be organized into a simple dashboard.
DATA STORY
Research shows more conversations between students and teachers can lead to increased attendance. Therefore, we designed this dashboard to drive more conversations, and increased engagement, between administrators, teachers, and students. This dashboard will identify important conversations from the district level down to each individual teacher.
FLOW
The District Status section provides district administrators with a high-level understanding of attendance trends and goals. The line chart shows actuals compared to target over time and gives a predicted range for future months.
The Opportunities by School section will help district administrators target the most important schools to work with. Most important is defined as having the highest opportunity for Absence Reduction.
The Conversation Topics section will help school administrators as they reach out to teachers on an individual basis. This sections provides relevant information such as subject, course, period, and day of the week.
INTERACTIONS
We gave special attention to interactions within Power BI. Using insights gained from each section, the next section can be filtered to target areas of interested or concern.
First use the Opportunities by School section to multi-select schools that are most important to target
For example, the user may wish to select “high schools” only.
This will result in a comparison of “high schools” that contain the highest opportunity for absence reduction. This section of the dashboard shows the ‘Absence Percentage’ distributed by Subject. This is helpful for school administrations to create strategies to decrease absences.
Next, within the Conversation Topics section, select a subject such as “math”. This gives school administrators the insights by individual teacher. Finally, further information about an individual teacher’s classes can be used to help facilitate relevant conversations.
SUMMARY
One of the most valuable aspects of growing in digital maturity, is to use data to provide insights into our area of influence. The use of Power BI to build this Absence Reduction Report is a powerful example of how new technology has transformed a school administrations’ ability to track their student’s attendance and identify strategies for reducing absences for schools, teachers, or by subject.
By Evan Schmidt, Ed Meyer, Tully Lanter, Jared Knutzen, and Casey McBreen
