Role: Product Designer Year: 2023 Project Duration: 8 months Platform: Web
Context
mCLASS is an K–6 assessment and reporting suite owned by Amplify. It allows elementary educators to assess their students’ literacy skills, and view insights based on these assessments. One component of this suite is admin reporting, which allows district administrators to view how the students in their district performed on their benchmark assessments. This case study focuses on the redesign of the admin reporting experience.
Project Goals
As Amplify evolved over the years, the need to unify its programs was critical because districts were looking for curriculum, assessment, and reporting in one place. As part of a unification initiative, the goal of this project was to migrate mCLASS’s admin reporting to Amplify’s core reporting platform, and redesign the experience to meet customer needs.
We started with an audit of the existing admin reporting experience. At the same time, our research team interviewed current customers, and our product team gathered requirements from our pilot customers.
User Experience Audit
We mapped out the user flow for a district administrator to view student performance and we noticed a few things:
The administrator must take many steps to generate a report including selecting the type of assessment, selecting the report, adjusting the parameters, and finally selecting “View Report”.
If the administrator wants to edit the parameters of the report, they must exit the report to make those changes instead of seeing them in real time.
User Research
Our research team interviewed a variety of current admin reporting customers to understand how they use the data to make decisions. They discovered the following takeaways:
Administrators use these reports to see how their elementary students are performing in literacy. They want to see growth over time to determine the effectiveness of instruction.
Identifying problem areas helps them know where to allocate resources and where to focus instruction.
Prioritization
We focused on the most common user, the single district administrator, and we prioritized displaying performance. When the admin lands on mCLASS Literacy Reports, they’re able to see how their district performed on the most recent benchmark assessment without having to click anywhere. In the previous design, admins had to click many times to generate data. In this design, we defined default settings to generate data faster. Those settings include:
Displaying DIBELS 8th Edition Assessment data (the standard benchmark assessment used by the district)
Displaying data for the most recent reporting period
Displaying data for the entire population that the admin is entitled to
Displaying the Composite Score
Use Cases
Based on user research and district requirements, the product team developed four primary use cases. These use cases drove our design decisions.
Use Case 1
As a single district administrator, I want to understand student performance in my district overall and by measure so I can support the students who need it most.
To give administrators a bird’s-eye view of student performance in their district, we display the composite score first. A student’s composite score is the aggregation of their subtest measures. In each grade, a student completes between 4–8 measures and they receive a score for each measure: Well Below Benchmark, Below Benchmark, Benchmark, or Above Benchmark. Once they complete all measures, they receive a composite score. This happens three times per school year. When the administrator lands on this report, they can see overall how their students are performing by looking at their composite score. If they see that many students received a Well Below Benchmark or Below Benchmark composite score, they may sort the data in different ways to pinpoint the struggle areas.
One way the administrator might sort the data is by measure. On the left side of the page, selecting “All subtest measures” breaks down performance by measure. Doing this allows them to see how all students performed on each measure at the top, and how each grade performed on each measure at the bottom. They may see, for example, that Grade 1 struggled with Phonemic Awareness more than other measures.
Use Case 2
As a single district administrator, I want to compare performance across school and class so I can identify and address challenges that may be affecting groups of students.
Another way administrators may pinpoint struggle areas is to sort the data by school. In this example, the administrator is viewing the composite score for each school, allowing them to get a sense of how each school is performing. They could then select the grade tabs to view individual grade performance for each school.
Let’s imagine the administrator sees that Riverside School is the lowest performing school. They may want to drill into this school to identify where the pain points are. The administrator selects Riverside School from the population dropdown at the top of the page. Now the administrator is able to see performance for this school only. They can also sort the data by grade, by class, and by teacher.
Use Case 3
As a single district administrator, I want to measure student growth between reporting periods so I can evaluate the efficacy of practices used in my district.
We allow administrators to measure growth between reporting periods through the reporting period dropdown. In this example, the district has just finished the end of year assessments, and the administrator is viewing data for all three assessment periods: beginning of year, middle of year, and end of year. Ideally, they want to see performance growth from the beginning to the end of the year, meaning higher percentages of Benchmark and Above Benchmark at the end of year.
Use Case 4
As a single district administrator, I want to make sure that students take the required assessments during the assessment period, and provide administration support if needed.
Aside from evaluating performance, the other primary use case of admin reports is to view completion. This report allows administrators to see who has completed benchmark assessments. A benchmark assessment in considered complete when all subtest measures have been completed.
Impact
More support for students
User research confirmed that these reports helped administrators monitor the effectiveness of instruction, and support the students who need it most.Improved user experience
Administrators found the data they were looking for faster. Overall, they found the platform easier to navigate than the previous version.Reduced cost
Migrating admin reports to the modern platform reduced engineering maintenance costs.