As a behavioral scientist, one of my favorite things to keep in mind is that I should “show” rather than “tell” whenever possible. To that end, I used Google Data Studio to quickly analyze and report on the participant feedback from a webinar that our team delivered.
Like many divisions, we use G Suite for Education. We have found the suite of applications powerful to meet a variety of challenges in our public school division related to collaboration, communication, access, analysis, and information management. All of these issues are components of the greater goal: to maximize data-driven decision-making so that we can more effectively meet the needs of our students.
With a little creativity and dedication, G Suite can be used to create individualized student progress dashboards, division initiative student outcome reports, manage MTSS infrastructure, and to simply collect and analyze participant feedback reports like the example below.
Too often, we collect data, whether it is student or participant, that are left to do little more than sit in a forms “responses” tab or a linked spreadsheet. This makes me sad when I consider that a main feature of my job is to promote the regular use of visual analysis and encourage a culture that expects to see the data.
Data Studio in G Suite provided me a free and elegant platform to put together a report that can be viewed online or off. This helps me “show” the value of data and compelling visual analysis, instead of “telling” people why it is so great. Hopefully, examples like this will continue the work of building a precedent for communication and data use within our division.
This report will be used to communicate with stakeholders about the impact of and response to the webinar. And as a team, we will use the analysis to inform our future offerings, modeling best practices in using data to make decisions going forward.
Hanna is a behavioral scientist and applied practitioner working in public education to improve systems and promote the use of evidence-based best practices for student support. Passionate about leveraging behavioral science to drive innovation and equity in education.