Infographic: Report card redux
- At October 14, 2011
- By Polly
- In Design, Infographics
5
For ages, I’ve been taunted by GOOD.is, one of my favorite websites and magazines, with their occasional projects, challenging readers to put their brains and creativity to work to make something interesting. I say taunted because, until recently, I didn’t have the time to participate in these designerd throwdowns. As luck would have it, the first challenge proffered during my new era of creative freedom really inspired me.
“Redesign the report card,” they said. But in keeping with my inner nerd, before any redesigning, I believe there should be some substantial rethinking. I knew immediately that I wanted to move the report card to an online platform and include some data visualization.
After the break is my submission cover letter to GOOD explaining various elements of my redesign, the strategy behind the format as well as how I imagined the new version of progress reporting could bring parents, students and educators together to improve students’ educational engagement and success. (Click image below for full-size infographic.)
SUBMISSION NOTES:
One vital aspect of student educational success is an active, engaged and enthused relationship between student, parents and teachers. I’ve envisioned an online, interactive report card that utilizes social media and data visualization, encouraging students and parents to interact with educators in a dynamic, comfortable environment.
A simple number or letter grade once every quarter or six-weeks doesn’t sufficiently equip parents to play an active role in their children’s education, so this platform provides an in-depth, up-to-the-minute progress report on student activity. Students, parents and educators would login to the platform to view grades, track progress and interact with each other.
Some key features include: a tabbed section highlighting detailed grading criteria for each course with pop-up details for specific assignments, a news feed of extracurricular activities, a Twitter-style feed of instant teacher comments, a highlighted comments area to encourage dialog between parents and teachers, links to additional information in course syllabi, contact links to educators, and various reminders about upcoming school assignments and events.
Jason
Beautiful! Excellent use of the space, colors, cool fonts (do I detect Antenna?!) I wish I received something like this for my kids. Certainly would promote a more engaging experience between teacher, student and parents! Nice job.
Alejandro
The idea of a report card is to tell the parent how well the student is doing in school. This is typically done with a single letter grade, which summarizes the student’s effort in the class.
Your redesign caused me to stop and think about what I was looking at. I’m not sure what data in your redesigned report card is important, and what isn’t. It doesn’t tell me how my child is doing.
Overall, it’s trying to solve a problem by throwing a lot of data at the user. This will work great for geeks who like charts and graphs and fancy pretty colors, but it won’t work for most parents, at least not as effectively as a simple list of classes and each of their grades.
Truly, you could have a “Explain this grade” link from each of the classes in the simple list that are current report cards. That could bring up another table of assignments and grades. That’s really all that’s neccesary, and it’s easy to understand. This redesign is far too complicated.
Polly
Thanks for your comments Alejandro.
The premise behind this project was to go beyond the traditional simple letter grade and give parents and students an in-depth look at patterns of performance that typical grading methods obscure.
For example, imagine a student whose grades in the grade log section of this report card started off the six-week period earning high As and then 4 weeks in, dropped to low Cs and Ds. The six-week average may still be a strong B, but that wouldn’t be an accurate representation of the student’s most recent performance, nor would it alert parents to a potential emerging problem.
The core idea here is to provide a thorough look at student academic performance as well as tie in things like notes on extracurriculars, attendance, discipline, etc in a dashboard-style platform to encourage parents, teachers and students to interact on a continuous basis, rather than only looking at a letter grade at delayed intervals.
Maria
I understand Alejandro’s point that there should be a way to summarize the data more concisely and immediately, but I don’t agree with his premise that all of this info is unnecessary. For the modern-day parent who is actively engaged in their child’s development, knowledge is powers and everything that this redesign communicates is relevant.
Perhaps a tab that is a general overview of all performance in all classes would be the only way this could be better. I am in love with what you have done and wish this was the de facto type of progress report all schools offered. Great work!!!
Alejandro
The concept of an interactive dashboard with grade breakdowns is really good, and is something that was rolled out early in my high school career many years ago. From what I remember of it, the interface was terrible. I actually wrote a paper (as a student) to the vendor to ask them to redesign it. At my university, we also had such a system (although parents couldn’t log in). It’s interface was just as bad.
Your redesign is miles ahead. I mean that genuinely. And I’m not saying that all this data is unnecessary, but perhaps that the way it is presented is overwhelming. Your design stresses the data, but only goes halfway. For instance, your graph in the middle does not have axes. What’s the point of a bar graph without knowing what values they represent?
It’s best to keep things simple. Not all parents will be able to understand how all this data comes together for a student’s performance. Too much emphasis was put on making it look good. Moreover, this interface is difficult to share with and discuss with your student. With so many things going on, so many colors, and elements, kids can get really distracted (parents too). The old report card format is so simple you can concentrate on the grades. If it was presented online and always up-to-date, that would be fantastic.
But however interactive the report card can be online, not sending out a report card would be a mistake. Parents will forget to check up on their student’s grades, or at least not consistently. Having a consistent grading schedule is a good way to review performance (quarterly reviews in the workplace? monthly one-on-ones?). Consistent reviews allows the time and reflection needed to improve one’s performance.
And not all parents have computers/internet.
Imagine if you could instead click on the grade and it could break it down for you with a table of assignments and a graph, and maybe even teacher notes underneath. That would be what is needed to further analyze your grade.
Sometimes simple is better.
Sorry if I sounded standoff-ish. I just have many opinions (that’s all they are) on this topic. I’ve been plagued with bad online grading systems for a long time.