From Scattered Scores to Real Student Insight

Turning benchmark data into something teachers can actually use

Executive Summary:

Primary Role

UX Designer

Timeline

February-May 2024

Teachers were stuck piecing together benchmark data manually, moving student by student with no way to see the bigger picture.

I led the design of a multi-layered dashboard that gives teachers instant visibility into performance, progress, and learning gaps across their entire classroom. Now supporting over 31,000 teachers and administrators, this work aids in influencing instructional decisions for more than 230,000 students.

Business Model

SaaS

Let’s talk about the mess.

Humble Beginnings

1 student

1 benchmark

repeat

To understand student performance, teachers had to:

Open one student
Open one benchmark
Find one score
Repeat that process over and over again

There was no way to zoom out and see what was happening across a class or grade. And if they wanted real insight, they had to export a CSV and figure it out themselves.

It wasn’t about more data...

It was about making the data usable.

Without a clear view across students, classes, or the full school year, it was nearly impossible to spot trends, group students effectively, or adjust instruction with confidence.

What should have supported curriculum planning, targeted instruction, and test preparation instead became a slow, manual process.

So we stopped thinking in terms of reports and started designing a system. One that connects performance, progress, and individual student insight, so teachers can move from understanding the classroom to supporting each student without losing context.

Start here

Let's get to the good stuff

This is where teachers land first.

Teachers have limited time, and need to answer one question fast...

What is going on with my students right now?

So we made that obvious.

Teachers can filter by grade, class, or specific groups of students, and those filters carry through the entire experience.
Performance is visualized in a way that is easy to scan but also interactive.
Instead of just seeing a chart, teachers can click into it and instantly see which students fall into each performance level.
Submission status is also visible here, so they can quickly tell who is done, who is in progress, and who still needs to complete the benchmark.
At the bottom, indicator-level data helps surface more specific skill gaps.

Measuring what actually changes

Tracking growth across benchmarks
to guide instruction

Once teachers understand where students are, the next question is

What is changing? And is my instruction is actually working?

This view makes that visible.

Instead of isolated scores, teachers can see BOY, MOY, and EOY results side by side, along with the change between each benchmark. That shift turns static data into something directional. It becomes clear who is improving, who is stalled, and where intervention is needed.
The table is designed for real workflows. Teachers can quickly search and pull a student to the top, making it easy to prep for conversations, adjust grouping, or plan next steps without digging.
Because filters carry over from the Summary view, everything stays grounded in the same context. Teachers are not restarting their analysis. They are continuing it.

Now it’s about the student

Connecting performance to

underlying skill gaps

At this point, teachers know what is happening and who it is happening to.

Now they need to understand why.

Teachers can see how a student is performing across the year and whether they are improving or slipping.
They can also break that down into specific speaking and writing indicators and compare that performance to other students at the same grade level.
This page is designed to be shared, so it works just as well in a parent conversation as it does in planning instruction.

What the research actually showed me

Understanding the heart
behind the work

One thing became really clear during this project. Teachers have limited time, while also trying to make some of the most important decisions for their students' outcomes. Throughout conducting user research, when presented with a prototype, teachers would often lead with "I love the colors! I love that in my 20 minute prep period, I can see the performance level of my students and group them!"

Instead of designing disconnected views, the shift and need became abundantly clear to create something that mirrors how teachers actually work. Teachers could finally see what was happening across their classroom without having to make their own spreadsheets or take up their weekends to understand what their students needed.

This project reinforced the idea that good data design isn’t about showing more. It’s about reducing the effort it takes to understand it. And when that clicked, it doesn’t just improve the experience. It changed how teachers did their jobs and got to the heart of making a difference in the lives of their students.