The goal of this project was to develop an interactive dashboard to visualize yearly student ACT performance across Iowa. The end result is a visualization tool that allows the user to view composite and focus area ACT scores (English, Math, etc.) at the district level. District data is organized by year, allowing one to compare performance over time. This dashboard also allows one to compare district performance against yearly statewide averages1. College readiness metrics are also visualized in the final pane. The process by which I collected and cleaned the data can be seen in the accompanying jupyter notebook.
Here is an example usage for someone interested in the ACT scores for the East Union Community School District. Scores below 18 are highlighted in red, while scores above 24 are highlighted in blue. In this example, we see that this school district had math scores lower than 18 in 2015 and 2020, but scored above 24 in Reading in 2016.
In the second panel, I select the Ames School District and Statewide Average for comparison. Ames consistently scores well against the Statewide school average across the state.
In the final panel, the College Readiness Metrics are displayed for Cedar Falls Community School District.
Footnotes
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Important Note: These calculated averages are not of aggregate student performance, but averages of school performance. This dashboard is not an analytical tool to assess performance at the student level. ↩