Cross-disciplinary Participatory & Contextual Design Research: Creating a Teacher Dashboard Application

Concepts of Human Computer Interaction have crossed disciplinary boundaries allowing the discovery of underlying stakeholder affordances to emerge during the design research phase of system design. For the current scenario, middle school mathematics teachers as data-driven decision makers are inundated with diagnostic and assessment data, resulting in data deluge. The situation is unlikely to subside as digital technologies and media are broadly adopted for instruction and learning. Teachers could benefit from tools to quickly sift through this data to inform classroom instruction. Data should be visualized in a way that teachers can make real-time formative and summative assessments of student progress. The purpose of this article is to introduce a mixed-method mode of discovery to uncover affordances innate to classroom teachers during the design of an iPad data visualization application. These technology-assisted “dashboard” platforms could serve as efficient and effective interventions to deal with the copious amounts of data streams now available to teachers.