After meeting with Rob from Achieve Hartford this week, we’ve determined an initial agenda to work with in the upcoming weeks. For now, most of the data I will be working with is achievement related, usually test scores from the state tests. The first task involves building on the interactive map I created last week, but this time including achievement data. More specifically, the map will show the distribution of schools based on the percentage of students at each school at the proficient level on the CMT (Connecticut Mastery Test) and CAPT (Connecticut Academic Performance Test). This will allow viewers to easily visualize graphically where the better performing schools are located.
Eventually, it would be good to incorporate several years worth of this data, and then create a visual progression over time, to determine if the higher performing schools are consistent across years, or if there are any dramatic changes within schools across years. This interactive school finder is more detailed than the map I made in my previous post, as it lets individuals search for specific schools in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, meaning individuals can type in their own address and see what schools are in their immediate vicinity. Additionally, I’m hoping to add an outline of the boundaries of Hartford and possibly the boundaries of the four school zones located within the city. BatchGeo seems to be limited in this respect.
The second priority is to create an interactive chart of each schools achievement progression overtime through CMT scores. The primary interactive feature would be the ability for the viewer to select the characteristics they are interested in, such as the specific school names or types of schools (magnet or district) he or she is interested in rather than viewing a massive chart of the 30+ schools in the HPS system. A second chart would be designed in a similar manner, but would look at the achievement progression of cohorts of students.
Something along the lines of this interactive visualization in the following link: Interactive Chart Example
Marissa – Good to see your project moving forward, with some more specific ideas about mapping school data. (But remember that in a school choice context, the location of a school does NOT necessarily mean that those scores are directly attributable to students who reside in that area.)
You are correct that BatchGeo is an easy but limited map tool. This week I’ll demonstrate more about the flexibility of Google Fusion Tables, and the Cleveland example you linked above is drawn from this GFT searchable map template by Derek Eder (http://derekeder.com/searchable_map_template/), which you’ll learn how to create in our seminar.