Today more than ever data in education must connect, must be robust enough to tell a story, and must leverage visualization tools. Often times we look at data collection as the action “building a survey” rather than facilitating a strategy that “gets the data we need to really improve our practice and operations.”
Things to think about before you put an internal team on “building a survey.”
- Are you “too close” to the topic to identify the questions that will get you “real” responses?
- Have you looked for all the data hiding in your organization? (We have a lot of data in education, are you mapping that data to paint a picture of your current status?)
- Do you have the capacity to analyze the data, looking for connections and statistically significant correlations? (At times raw numbers don’t show you the detail that you need to take intentional action).
Getting help with your school/district data collection.
Larger districts often have a person with expertise in data analysis and tool design. For with and without that in-house expertise we offer a tool creation service that allows you to:
- Use already written questions (most of which have validity numbers backing them).
- Use our survey tool (secure, accessible, etc.).
- Access your raw data.
- Enable our team to create a visualization of your data that can help you interpret and explore what that data may mean.
- Integrate this data in to your existing data.
Visualization of data in education
At Metiri we can build visualization using Tableau, Power BI, and Google Data Studio. We can do this with small project level data, district level data, or even state level data. If you are interested in learning more about our data visualization consulting and packages let’s chat!