top of page
Search
Kelly Adams
Jan 23, 20234 min read

Student Performance Dashboard

Updated: Feb 6, 2023

Introduction

For my tutoring job to showcase student performance I created my own quick dashboard using Excel. It had graphs on a student's scores in: tests, quizzes, and assignments. This helped me analyze how a student was doing in a class. From there I could change my tutoring methods to better help the student. I wanted to create a more detailed and cohesive dashboard to show student performance. It would demonstrate to student's families how they're doing in their class.


Goal: Show student performance in their math class over a semester.


Question: How is the student doing in the class?


Note: All of the data provided in this project is made up. While the data is closely correlated to a student I worked with last year the numbers are different and the assignments are renamed. This is for privacy and propriety reasons. The students name and school are also fictional (not my creation). I used a fictional character and school from the TV show Glee.


Quick Links:


Table of Contents:

 

Process

The original data was cleaned and manipulated in Microsoft Excel, then I used Tableau Public to create an interactive dashboard.


Microsoft Excel

I used Microsoft Excel to clean and generate my data. I have the following columns (which are typical for student performance data):

  1. Assignment Name

  2. Date - date of the assignment

  3. Type - either assignment, quiz or test

  4. Score - what the student scored on the assignment

  5. Total Points - total possible points

  6. Percentage - percentage the student got

  7. Grade - the grade the student got (out of 100)

  8. Notes - any notes the teacher may have

There are three types of assignments: assignment (like homework), quiz, or test. Each one has a different set of total points. Assignments have a total of 30 possible points, quizzes have a total of 50 possible points, and tests have a total of 100 possible points. Math teachers typically try to keep the assessment points the same to make it easier to grade. Though this is not always the case but for my fictional dataset it is.


Tableau

Next I created an interactive dashboard in Tableau to show student performance. I included the following metrics:

  1. Final Grade

  2. Average Test Score

  3. Average Quiz Score

  4. Average Assignment Score

  5. Test Performance

  6. Quiz Performance

  7. Assignment Performance

  8. Type of Assignments

  9. Records (list of all of the assignments)

I kept the dashboard simple and concise. I wanted the focus to be student performance over the semester. How are they doing in their tests, quizzes, and assignments? Are they improving over time? On average how are they doing?


At the top is the title along with student information like: name, grade, and class. Useful when creating multiple dashboards for different students. Next, are the top metrics to know like the final grade and average scores. Then there are three charts for student performance in tests, quizzes, and assignments. Along with a breakdown of the type of assignments throughout the semester. At the bottom is the table of records. Essentially the raw data for the families/tutors to look at. While this isn't common or the purpose of a dashboard, people like having the ability to look at each record.


Misc.

I created the background using Figma. The color scheme was used from the William McKinley High School Logo (which is from the show Glee and all rights belong to the creators). The school logo would be in the top right (the one used from Glee is a placeholder) along with the student information (which is a character from Glee).

 

Finished Project


 

Overview of Data

  1. Final Grade: 70.13

  2. Average Test Score: 74.33

  3. Average Quiz Score: 67.33

  4. Average Assignment Score: 68.96

  5. Type: 60 assignments in total

    1. 6 Tests

    2. 6 Quizzes

    3. 48 Assignments

 

Insights

While the data is made up and the grade is not weighted (like it usually is for most classes), you can still gather some insights.

  • After the student began receiving tutoring on 9/30/2022 their overall performance improved.

  • There are more assignments than tests and because of the way the grade is calculated, the student should focus their time on assignments to get a better grade.

  • The student did the worst in Test 1, and should focus on improving that in order to do their best on their final.

 

What I Learned

  1. How to format the top metrics (e.g. final grade, avg. test score, etc.) to make it more visually appealing

  2. Benefit of showing three graphs in one row (e.g. performance graphs) instead of trying to show all three metrics on one graph. Which is what I did for previous dashboards.

  3. How to show the raw data in the dashboards using crosstabs.

 

Summary

This was a fun mini project to complete. I wanted to demonstrate how I've used my data analytics and visualization skills in my current role as a tutor. And practice my data visualization skills and test myself to see how long it would take me to complete this project from end-to-end. By collecting, cleaning, analyzing and visualizing the data. I want to improve my speed (while keeping accuracy) in building a dashboard.


This project took me 2 1/2 hours to complete. What probably helped the most was having a dashboard background template in Figma. Most of my time was spent in Tableau visualizing the data and cleaning up the dashboard (labels, colors, tooltips, etc.).

bottom of page