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Classroom orchestration requires teachers to concurrently manage multiple activities across multiple social levels (individual, group, and class) and under various constraints. Real-time dashboards can support teachers; however, designing actionable dashboards is a huge challenge. This paper describes a participatory design study to identify and inform critical features of a dashboard for displaying relevant, actionable, real-time data. We leveraged a Sense-Assess-Act framework to present dashboard mockups to teachers for feedback. Although the participating teachers differed in how they would use the presented information (during class or after class as a post hoc analysis tool), two common emerging themes were that they wanted to use the data to a) better support their students and b) to make broader instructional decisions. We present data from our study and propose a customizable, mobile dashboard, that can be adapted to a teacher's specific needs at a specific time, to help them better facilitate learning activities.
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This content will become publicly available on May 13, 2026
Co-Designing MathFlowLens: A Teacher-Focused Tool for Identifying Strategic Thinking in Mathematics
This project is a second-round development iteration of the MathFlowLens Dashboard, a data visualization tool for teachers that helps them identify their students’ strategic thinking and problem solving pathways. Development is guided by a co-design process where teachers were consulted multiple times to provide feedback and usability data that are analyzed and turned into features that meet those needs. Focus groups with middle school mathematics teachers gave insight into the round-one prototype of the dashboard, the data from which was used to synthesize needs into features that address them. This project’s development saw the inclusion of a new data visualization component that allows teachers to see each individual student’s journey through a problem – as well as several other modifications and accessibility features. As an iterative product, future work should include additional focus groups with teachers and studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2142984
- PAR ID:
- 10596302
- Publisher / Repository:
- WPI eprojects
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Institution:
- Worcester Polytechnic Institute
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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