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Providing educators with the data they need to help improve student outcomes
A comprehensive survey administration and data reporting system used by school leaders to implement school improvement.
https://www.5-essentials.org/
Client:
University of Chicago
“Inquirium is hands down one of the best service providers I have worked with during my career. We utilized the Inquirium team for numerous projects over more than a decade. Every single project started with a deep dive into what we wanted to accomplish, what challenge we were trying to solve, the use cases for our work, and the design elements we had in mind, if any. The team at Inquirium always took the time to truly understand our projects and then, using their knowledge of design and the field of education, added so much value and helped propel our work forward to better results than we could have imagined.”
Elliot Ransom
Challenge
Researchers at the University of Chicago developed the 5Essentials survey, which is administered to all students and teachers within the Chicago Public Schools and other districts nationwide. Past research has shown that schools strong on at least three of the five essentials are 10 times more likely to improve student learning than schools weak on three or more of the five essentials.
Initial surveys were paper-based, and over 200,000 students a year completed surveys. The project needed help in district phases: first, to identify a technical solution for administering the surveys online for such a large target audience, and second, to deliver survey results, customized for every school in the district, in a way that would help educators identify the key data that they could leverage to improve student outcomes.
Solution
Inquirium helped identify the challenges inherent in such a massive online data collective effort, which required specific expertise to build a solution that would scale with each survey’s needs. We also created an adaptive an flexible authoring system that allowed the 5E team to create custom reports that integrated the results of their surveys. Inquirium created a detailed design specification for a Survey Administration Module and wrote the RFP, which led to the 5E team finding a great development partner.
For the Data Reporting Tool, Inquirium designed and built a website that uses custom data visualizations to help educators investigate their school’s performance. This is built on top of a data management backend that processes survey results to generate automated web and PDF reports; an invitation and permissions system to manage user access; a caching system for high-demand use cases; and customization tools that allow the 5e team to tailor each report to the needs of different school districts.
Later additions to the 5E family involved different kinds of surveys whose data needed to be reported in completely different ways, including the Early Education Essentials and Cultivate, which explores non-cognitive learning outcomes. Inquirium led the expansion of the data back end to support multiple kinds of surveys, while customizing the front end to report each survey in its own way.
Results
For more than 15 years, the 5Essentials, Early Education Essentials and Cultivate Survey & Reporting Tools have been used by nearly 100 school districts nationwide as a vital resource for school improvement—and have generated self-sustaining revenue for the client. Inquirium has been an active partner with the UChicago team since the beginning, participating in design iteration, new feature development, maintenance and support.