Training & Support
A year on from the launch of the GL Data Dashboard, Crispin Chatterton outlines what we have learnt, what further improvements teachers would like to see and what’s coming next
Last year, in response to teachers’ requests to see if we could make our assessment data more user-friendly, we launched the GL Data Dashboard – a dashboard that allows our customers to see all their key assessments and historical data in one place. It was designed to help staff gain a view of the whole student at-a-glance and make meaningful trends – for students, cohorts and across schools and school groups – easier to spot.
The GL Data Dashboard in action
We can see that users of our online assessment platform, Testwise, including senior leaders, teachers and assessment administrators, are repeatedly returning to view their assessment results via the dashboard.
When users enter, they first see topline analysis for the whole school and have the ability to then drill down into the data for specific groups of students. The most popular dashboard option is the pupil view page, which enables users to see an individual student’s results across ability, attainment and barriers to learning at-a-glance.
Samantha Krbacevic, Deputy Head Academic, Repton Prep, Derby, sums up the difference this has made perfectly: “Previously, we found it could take quite a long time to get the data we wanted, so it has been really valuable to be able to log in and instantly see everything to do with a particular pupil at the click of the button. That’s what the dashboard does for us, so this is a really good development.”
Continual improvement
When we launched the dashboard, we also said that it wasn’t a one-off – that it would be the start of a series of continual improvements to Testwise that sought to respond to your needs and adapt accordingly. We aim to make it a constant, iterative process, enabling us to be more responsive to your feedback and introduce upgrades frequently and seamlessly.
One year on, I’d like to share what further changes you have told us you’d like to see, how we have responded and what we intend to do next.
What teachers wanted
The first request was to sort student test access codes by surname, all designed to make test administration much easier. This has been done and is now possible.
The second was make it easier to both import and extract student data. Here, we have improved the way student data is imported, which means there are fewer failed imports, and the process is much smoother. We have also made it easier to extract student data from Testwise by allowing users to export all the data from our assessments for a single student, a cohort or the whole school.
Fully automatic student updates will be coming soon, and we aim to streamline data integration even further by allowing the export of data across school groups.
What else?
As with any digital platform, there have been a few minor but annoying bugs that have been identified and fixed. But we’ve also developed a number of features that will significantly improve the user experience. These include:
- Making group (or cluster) reports for trusts and school groups easier to run
- Moving our Exact assessment over to the new Testwise platform so customers only have to go to one place to arrange test sittings and extract the data
- Enhancing our PASS reporting so that you can see school wellbeing trends over time.
What’s next?
Teachers can expect some exciting improvements next year as we focus on making it even easier to navigate and extract information from Testwise. One major development will be the integration of paper and digital data to enable cross-reporting. We are also getting ahead of the game in terms of Artificial Intelligence. While we already take steps to protect our assessments, we are now looking at further measures we can take to prevent students using AI-enabled browser tools to help them perform better on our tests in the future.
Our aim is to provide new tools and insights that enhance students’ learning, development and performance. Everything we do will be designed to help teachers and leaders use data to make a meaningful difference in the classroom and inform, align and evidence change across schools and groups of schools. We will contact all of our customers when we have updates to share.
