Dashboards and e-courses as support for education professionals in data usage.

From 2024 onwards, central assessments for Dutch and mathematics will be introduced in primary and secondary education in Flanders. The main goal of these assessments is to support school development and improve the quality of education. These assessments can only achieve this goal when education professionals receive meaningful data about the assessment results and undergo a research cycle that translates data into concrete actions to improve classroom and school practices. To support this, we (the Central Assessments in Education Support Center) are focusing on developing a user-friendly dashboard with data visualizations on the attainment of educational goals and on developing an e-course with guidelines for navigating the research cycle. Through educational design research, we investigate how the dashboard and e-course can be designed according to experts, literature, and education professionals. To answer the research questions, interviews and focus groups are conducted with experts (n=25), school leaders (n=23), teachers (n=19), teacher educators (n=4), and educational advisors (n=24). From the results, we distill five design principles that serve as the basis for developing the dashboard and e-course, namely (1) the content must be perceived as thoughtful, relevant, rich, and reliable, (2) the way the data is presented facilitates accurate interpretation, which is further supported through an e-course, (3) the dashboard and e-course provide education professionals not only with data but also with guidelines for navigating the research cycle, (4) the structure is clear and user-friendly, and (5) the needs of education professionals are central and take precedence over technological aspects.