Lots of things. In brief, they are useful for planning, analyzing, and communicating.
Here are six specific things our clients have told us they’re accomplishing with our visual tools.
(a) Identifying strengths and weak spots relative to other schools and districts whose students are highly similar to your own;
(b) Empowering leaders who have little confidence in their quantitative skills to explore correlations and attempt root-cause analysis using their eyes to identify meaningful patterns;
(c) Setting reasonable goals in LCAPs and SPSAs for future improvement, goal-setting that can really follow the S.M.A.R.T. goals methodology.
(d) Sparing leadership teams from wasting time shoveling data, and giving them more time to think about what that data means;
(e) Enabling teams to discover the relation of one factor to another (like SAT participation rates and scores), factors that are separated in the silos of most district information systems;
(f) Measuring the progress of learning in a way that adheres to the science of psychometrics, and the common sense your board and public expect.
