Data Dashboards as a Story-telling Tool: Advantages and Considerations

Abstract Information: Data dashboards are effective tools for illustrating educational disparities through visual story-telling. In this paper, we will describe key features of dashboards that facilitate the communication of a story with data visuals. Additionally, we will highlight how the flexibility of dashboards maintains the nuanced and dynamic nature of evaluation stories. In particular, dashboards can illustrate the highly complex stories of social programs by portraying the multiple factors that affect their outcomes, such as factors at the policy, community, and organizational levels. We will share an example of a statewide data dashboard that we used to tell the story of equity in computer science education. Finally, we will discuss challenges we have encountered with using dashboards to convey a story, general recommendations to strengthen their impact, and how they can serve as effective tools for clearly communicating data-driven stories to stakeholders.

Relevance Statement: Evaluators often depend on data visualizations to help communicate ideas to their stakeholders. Data visualizations can serve as clear and succinct means of summarizing key points in evaluation reports. However, communicating nuanced findings of complex topics can be challenging in traditional report formats where texts and visuals are static. We will share how we developed a statewide data dashboard about computer science (CS) education equity designed to be used by stakeholders from across the education system, including policymakers, administrators, and educators. There are several political and social factors that contribute to inequity in CS education. We felt that the best way to communicate this story was through a comprehensive dashboard that could visualize several contributing factors. A dashboard would also allow different educational stakeholders to access data that they can customize to their unique needs and contexts. 

In developing the dashboard, we encountered multiple challenges with telling the story in a manner that is clear to different audiences. We found that some visual formats were not digestible by the broad variety of stakeholders we were targeting. Additionally, not all visuals were effective at contributing to the overall message we wanted to convey. We will discuss methods used to help overcome these challenges as well as general implications of using dashboards as a story-telling tool. Despite challenges, we found that dashboards can be a powerful tool for using data to illustrate stories in an evaluation.