Project Overview
Can money really buy good grades? The Gonski Data Lab dashboard allows you to visually explore the relationships between educational outcomes and various other social influences on student performance.
Project Commissioner
Gonski Institute for Education (UNSW Sydney)
Project Creator
Team
Small Multiples worked with the Gonski Institute for Education (UNSW Sydney) and Adrian Piccoli (institute director and former Education Minister) to create this new tool. On the development team were Stephanie Grace and Dasha Yurovskaya (design), Harry Morris (Creative Developer) and Andrea Lau (project director).
Project Brief
The mission of the Gonski Institute for Education is to address growing inequality in Australian education. The institute wanted to provoke questions about the effect of social influences and policy changes on student performance, and turned to Small Multiples to create a dashboard that would combine different data sources to give a big picture.
The aim was not to draw inferences about cause-and-effect, but to present the data in a way that encourages further exploration of the facts. The tool allows users to visualise and correlate multiple variables (location, income, and youth unemployment levels for example) with various educational results (e.g. NAPLAN average, literacy and numeracy).
Project Need
Policy makers and researchers need a broad overview of the different factors that are associated with educational outcomes, and where the areas of greatest need are. This project brings together various data sources in a novel way to make these correlations clearer.
Parents, community activists and members of the public can all gain insights easily, helping them in their advocacy and decision making.
User Experience
Rather than combing through statistical tables and reports, politicians, academics and community members can now view complex educational datasets in a dynamic, user-friendly and interactive format.
This project is all about packaging data in a new and engaging way - allowing the hidden patterns to come out. Simple search features and smooth animations make data analysis easy and enjoyable.
Project Marketing
The project was recently featured in a Sydney Morning Herald article, where the tool itself was also embedded for people to use. The piece received tens of thousands of page views and high engagement times, reflecting the public need for this information.
"Money can’t buy good grades, state-wide NAPLAN data reveals": https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/money-can-t-buy-good-grades-naplan-data-reveals-surprises-20210215-p572j6.html.
Project Privacy
This is a live and publicly accessible project, based on public data. You can find it at gonskidatalab.com.au.
Tags
Digital - Education
EdTech focuses on how education is changing through technology, changing the way we learn and process knowledge. What will stand out here is those that enhance the learning experience and make a lasting impression.
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