Exploring Ecosystems in Indiana’s Education and Workforce Development Using a Data Visualization Dashboard
Abstract
Large datasets related to Indiana’s Education and Workforce development are used by various demographics such as stakeholders and decision makers in education and government, parents, teachers and employees of various companies to find trends and patterns in the data to better guide decision-making through statistical analysis. However, most of this data is scattered, textual and available in the form of excel sheets which makes it harder to look at the data from different perspectives, drill down and roll up the data and find trends and patterns in the data. Such data representation does not take into account the inherent characteristics of the user which can affect how well the user understands, perceives and interprets the data.Information dashboards used to view and navigate between visualizations of different datasets, provide a coherent, central access to all data, and make it easy to view different aspects of the system. The purpose of this research is to create a new data visualization dashboard for visualizing education and workforce data and find which design principles are applicable while designing such a dashboard for the target demographic in the education and workforce domain. This study also aims at assessing how the introduction of such a data dashboard affects the work processes and decision making of stakeholders involved in education and workforce development in the state of Indiana.User studies consisting of usability testing and semi-structured interviews with the stakeholders in education and workforce development in the state of Indiana is conducted to test the effectiveness of the dashboard. Finally, this research proposes how a regional map-based dashboard can be used as an effective method to design a data dashboard for education and workforce data for other states and other domains as well.
Degree
M.Sc.
Advisors
Byrd, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Education
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