These prototypes attempt to display meaningful information about individual students within the class. Teachers want to be able to view individuals within the class to identify those who are falling behind or most in need of remediation.
scatterplot appoach
A scatterplot can be used to visualize each students' progress in terms of mastery and level of exposure (or number of assistments encountered). This can be used to show performance across standards all standrdas, or per standard or skill. Lines or shading can be used in conjunction with color coding to highlight students in trouble.
Pros
- Helps teachers identify who is falling behind compared to the rest of the class.
- Information is available about each student by rolling over, or clicking of a particular node on the plot.
- Enables teachers to identify groups of outliers visually.
- students lacking exposure may be sluggish or have absentee issues
- students who mastered with very few problems may have prior experience or high abillity
- students who have a large amount of exposure and still have not mastered concepts may be in need of remediation with teacher
Cons
- does not show progress over time
- unable to compare across standards or groups of standards on one screen
tree approach
The tree approach allows teachers to view all their students in a list and drill down within each student as they choose. Viewing a list of names, the color coding makes it clear which students are in need of help. Within each student, the teacher can view which reporting categories, standards, skills, or questions they have mastered or not based on the color or icon in the tree. By selecting a particular item, the teacher can view the details in the white window to the right.
Pro
- Compares between students
- View multiple students information at once
- Easy access to detailed informaion without losing context of tree structure
Con
- Too many levels of aggregation
- Cannot expand more than 1 or 2 students before list scrolls off of the screen