Supporting K-12 Teachers’ Decision Making through Interactive Visualizations : A case study to improve the usability of a real-time analytic dashboard

Sammanfattning: Recent research have been focusing on supporting teachers in the classroom. Such support has been shown to benefit from the development and employment of teacher-facing analytic dashboards to help them to make fast and effective decisions in regard to the in-class student learning activities. The evolving interest in this field has facilitated the emergence of the Teaching Analytics area of practice and research. However, current research efforts have indicated that the use of such dashboards usually adds another layer to the already dynamic and complex situation for teachers, which can divert their attention and can often be experienced as a disturbing factor in the class. Therefore, it is highly important to examine how such teacher-facing dashboards can be improved from the user experience perspective, in a way that would allow teachers to grasp student learning activities easily and with good perceived usability. The aim of this study is to understand how we can better design teacher-facing dashboards to more adequately support K-12 teachers in their decisions that would provide relevant in-time and student support. The study applies Nielsen's three-round iterative design approach to understand the existing usability problems and further develop the dashboard, originally designed by the company. In order to investigate users’ perceived attitude towards the redesigned dashboard, the final prototype has been evaluated through a Technology Acceptance Model questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with nine participants. As a result, the redesigned teacher-faced dashboard was proven to have a high potential to support teachers’ decisions. The efficiency of the Technology Acceptance Model was verified and put into general context on how tools for teachers should be designed for the usage in the classroom. Additionally, some major challenges for teachers with using external tools during class were discovered and are discussed in the context of a newly designed dashboard.