Indiana Department of Education and Resultant Build Graduates Prepared to Succeed Dashboard to Boost Transparency, Inform Decision-Making, and Improve Indiana Schools

IDOE resolved to make school performance data transparent and engaged Resultant to build an innovative dashboard with data from multiple state agencies presented through an intuitive, engaging interface. The result, the award-winning Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed (GPS) dashboard, sets a new standard for transparency and insight for families and communities in evaluating student and school success. Going beyond conventional academic metrics, it shows how well schools are preparing students to thrive, whether their next steps include enrollment, employment, or enlistment leading to service.

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IDOE resolved to make school performance data transparent and engaged Resultant to build an innovative dashboard with data from multiple state agencies presented through an intuitive, engaging interface.

The result, the award-winning Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed (GPS) dashboard, sets a new standard for transparency and insight for families and communities in evaluating student and school success. Going beyond conventional academic metrics, it shows how well schools are preparing students to thrive, whether their next steps include enrollment, employment, or enlistment leading to service.

Going beyond conventional academic metrics, it shows how well schools are preparing students to thrive, whether their next steps include enrollment, employment, or enlistment leading to service. 

The Challenge

Data scattered across disparate systems and multiple state agencies presents accessibility issues, which is a big reason some states tell the story of student achievement through summative data like standardized test scores and graduation rates. IDOE knows students are much more than that and sought to redefine success by integrating key characteristics—like academic mastery, career and postsecondary readiness, and civic literacy to name a few—to more fully understand and show students’ level of readiness for post-secondary success.

Much of the data already existed, but a combination of innovation, will, and collaboration drew it into meaningful visualizations about what is taking place across Indiana schools and the students they serve.

About the client

The Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) is dedicated to serving the state's learners, educators, and communities by ensuring equitable access to high-quality education. With a mission to empower students to achieve their fullest potential, IDOE engages collaboratively with schools, families, and community partners to address the unique needs of every learner. IDOE is relentlessly focused on driving meaningful impact through innovative solutions that enhance learning outcomes. By advancing data-driven decision-making and fostering transparency, the department develops tools and insights to measure success, enabling Indiana state leaders to make informed choices. Through its commitment to making data accessible and actionable, IDOE ensures that the public understands and supports the transformative power of education in Indiana.

Highlights of the Graduates Prepared to Succeed dashboard benefits:

  • Data-Driven Empowerment: Resultant synthesized data across the education and workforce continuum into a unified, user-friendly dashboard, enabling informed decision-making to support continuous learning, provide stakeholders with transparent information about school progress and performance, and help improve Indiana schools.
  • Transparent Communication: With a human-centered approach, Resultant delivered an intuitive interface showcasing key indicators developed in collaboration with IDOE, enhancing transparency and engagement.
  • Collaborative Excellence: The award-winning Indiana GPS dashboard sets a new standard for transparency and insight for families and communities in evaluating school and student success.

Our Approach

Over a two-year period, our team collaborated with educators, community leaders, parents, and policymakers to identify key indicators of student success. Extensive research and feedback showed there are a number of key characteristics critical to a student’s lifelong success. These 17 indicators showcase student performance across all grade levels and include metrics such as the number of students who have mastered foundational reading skills by the end of third grade, met or exceeded sixth grade math growth goals, and completed college coursework prior to high school graduation.

Drawing from a broader range of datasets meant ensuring data quality, reliability, and security, so our team worked with IDOE to establish data governance best practices and strategies, supported data sharing agreements, and implemented necessary security practices.

The teams extracted, transformed, and loaded data from across agencies, including the Indiana Department of Workforce Development and the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, into a multidimensional cube hosted in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. Then, they compiled and presented it in a user-friendly dashboard to enable data-driven decision-making by various stakeholder groups.    

Our Solution

Indiana GPS launched in December 2022, with a visually appealing home page featuring scrollytelling (vertical, multimedia stories users scroll through) to help visitors understand what’s being measured, why it matters, and how it supports the path to student success.

Public users can focus on the data they most want, searching by school or district to find trend analyses for every indicator and filtering by various demographics and student populations.

Authenticated users, such as principals and other educators, can log in to explore the student row-level data underlying the aggregated data shown to the public. This deeper analytical capability provides nuanced insights and fuels continuous school and program improvement across the K-12 continuum.

Site features continue to grow, with additions like a geospatial map and school comparison tool, which enable public users to search and do a side-by-side comparison of selected schools across various indicators.

Indiana GPS is a one-stop-shop, displaying information and data that matter to individual students and families, as well as the economic success of communities across Indiana.

Dr. Katie Jenner

Indiana Secretary of Education

KEY FEATURES

These elements were critical to the success of this project:

Comprehensive Assessment

Indiana GPS evaluates student progress across these critical dimensions: academic mastery; career and post-secondary readiness; communication and collaboration; work ethic; and civic, financial, and digital literacy.

Extensive Stakeholder Engagement

The dashboard is a result of extensive consultation with educators, parents, employers, and advocacy groups to ensure the dashboard's metrics reflect the diverse characteristics critical to lifelong success of Indiana's students.

Customized Data Integration

Resultant developed robust data integrations and visualizations, allowing educators, families, and community stakeholders to track school and student performance and identify areas for improvement across the K-12 continuum.

Future-Focused Design

Indiana GPS continues to innovate and expand beyond traditional measures by incorporating indicators such as career exploration and employability credentials to anticipate future workforce demands and equip students for success in an ever-changing landscape.

The Outcomes

By launching and continuing to enhance the GPS dashboard in response to things like new data availability and stakeholder feedback, IDOE has built not just a public-facing school performance dashboard, but a truly nimble, scalable, and user-friendly foundation upon which to tell a transparent story about school performance and student readiness for life in the 21st Century.

The GPS dashboard successfully delivers these outcomes:

  • Empowering educators by providing a variety of essential data points to support continuous improvement of student learning across the K–12 continuum
  • Supporting families and community stakeholders by providing meaningful, relevant, and transparent information about school progress and performance
  • Elevating the highest-performing schools as models of excellence, and identifying other schools for additional support

In 2023, for their collaboration and development of the Indiana GPS Dashboard, IDOE received the SEDTA (State Educational Technology Directors Assocation) State Achievement Award for Interoperability and Resultant received the Ed-Fi Alliance Award for Innovation/Innovator of the Year.

Impact

Indiana GPS empowers stakeholders to measure school performance and student readiness in a transparent, data-driven way, and enables leaders to make decisions to uplift their schools and students. It equips administrators to delve deeper into areas of success and areas that can be improved.

GPS visualizes the 17 nuanced, research-based success factors, enabling users to understand in ten seconds or less the data they’re viewing and inviting their further engagement. Since its launch, the public GPS site has buzzed with visitor activity, increasing awareness and strengthening decision-making through educational data.

IDOE and Resultant used human-centered design principles to build Indiana GPS for growth and enhancement. Future releases will continue to support the needs of end-users while incorporating emerging research and data. The GPS dashboard will continue to play a critical role as the go-to site for school performance and student readiness.

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