Advising on a backend and dashboard for language placement tests

The language departments asked the DataSquad how to visualize the skills of incoming students who take a placement test. The project was longer than any one student would stay at the college, so the squad could not build it, but it could still help. Quinn Schiller sketched a prototype backend, the kind of database the squad would want to query to draw the graphs, for the development team to use as a base.

Solomon Foster then worked with academic technologists on the dashboard itself. They chose heatmaps to show combined test data, since rows and columns can stand for different levels, from an individual student to a cohort to a whole class, and from single questions to broad skills.

It is an example of the squad contributing design advice to a project that someone else builds.