Promoting Instructor and Department Action via Simple, Actionable Tools and Analyses

In this paper, we present some of our ongoing, as well as more recent work designing, implementing, and improving three tools to help university instructors and department leaders make evidence-based improvements to instruction. The first tool, Know Your Students, is a very early prototype that helps instructors tailor their instruction based on characteristics of the students they would not otherwise be aware of in their courses. The other two tools, the Departmental Diagnostic Dashboard and Ribbon Tool, help department chairs, curricular chairs, and/or advisors identify and make sense of student patterns they may be trying to minimize or enhance within individual courses, course series, and/or throughout their entire program. This paper illustrates examples of these tools and some of the actions they have inspired as a means of improving student outcomes.