ERIC Number: ED613806
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Jul
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
The Effect of School Report Card Design on Usability, Understanding, and Satisfaction. REL 2021-101
Chandler, Jesse; Hartog, Jacob; Lipman, Erin; Gellar, Jonathan
Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic
Education policymakers view transparency and accountability as critical to the success of schools. To support these goals, the District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has developed an online school report card for communicating information about the characteristics and performance of schools. To support OSSE's interest in making report cards more usable, this study assessed the effect of different designs on how easy the report cards are to use and understand, how easy it is to find information in them, and whether users would recommend the site to others. The study found that moving the link to details of the district's School Transparency and Reporting (STAR) framework from the top of the page to beneath the STAR score improved the site's usability and that reporting the number of points possible for each metric led to a better understanding of how the score is calculated. The combination of design features that produced the best performance on all measures included these two design changes. Other designs had mixed effects. In particular, making year-over-year change in school performance salient made it easier to identify which schools had improved the most, but participants disliked this feature (demonstrated by lower ratings for usability and satisfaction). In general, participants who accessed the site with mobile devices had more difficulty using it. This study illustrates how policymakers and practitioners in other states can efficiently test school report card design changes at scale. [For the Study Snapshot, see ED613807. For the appendixes, see ED613808.]
Descriptors: Records (Forms), School Effectiveness, Institutional Characteristics, Usability, Design, Comprehension, Satisfaction, Access to Information, Visual Aids, Users (Information), Public Schools
Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic. Available from: Institute of Education Sciences. 550 12th Street SW, Washington, DC 20202. Tel: 202-245-6940; Web site: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/midatlantic/index.asp
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) (ED/IES); Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic (ED); Mathematica
Identifiers - Location: District of Columbia
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: EDIES17C0006
IES Publication: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects/project.asp?projectID=4632
Author Affiliations: N/A