Background

In Washington state, all kindergartners complete an assessment called WAkids. This one-on-one assessment measures kinder readiness in 6 (sometimes 8) domains. Cognitive, language, literacy, math, physical, social-emotional, Spanish language, and Spanish literacy (only some districts qualify to add Spanish lang. and Spanish Lit domains).

The dataset was found from data.gov, and contains many columns including, OrganizationLevel, Measure (domains), District Name, School Name, Student Groups, and Percent. For our analysis, we focused on Organization Level, District name, School name, Measure, and Percent columns.

Purpose

This dashboard seeks to provide users with a "big picture" view of Washington state Kinder readiness, with the ability to drill down to individual schools. We also created a second dashboard for users to see the top 10 and bottom 10 school districts as measured by Kinder readiness by domain.

The questions we aimed to answer through these visualizations were:

-Which domain are Kinder's typically most ready for?

-What are the top performing districts?

-What are the bottom performing districts?

Data Cleaning and Manipulation

We uploaded the dataset into SQL and performed data cleaning and manipulation by checking the ID numbers and date for the correct number of characters and consistent data types. Additionally, we knew this dataset contained suppressed information which meant there were many NULL values in the Percent column. We executed a SQL query to delete all the NULL values in this column so that any aggregated data wouldn't be skewed.

Next, we ran a few queries to explore the dataset. We found that by filtering the data to return only the rows with the 'Readiness Flag' allowed us to see the percentage of students ready or not ready by domain. We determined the dimensions we wanted to focus on were going to be Organization level, District, School, Measure, and percentage because by looking at these measures, users can easily identify Kinder readiness on multiple levels.

The Results

We exported our data into Tableau to create some visualizations. The first visualization is a bar graph displaying Kinder Readiness by domain. This map represents all Washington state school districts. Physical readiness being the highest percentage, and math being the lowest. Spanish language and literacy are also at the lowest, but keep in mind not every school district assesses their students for Spanish language and literacy.

The second visualization lets you drill down to individual schools, and see their Kinder's readiness percentages by domain. Again, some schools will have Spanish language and literacy measures while some do not.

When you navigate to the second tab, you will see two more visualizations of the Top 10 and Bottom 10 school districts as measured by percentage by domain. We also added a Count of Schools in each district. I found it interesting that all districts within the top 10 only had 2 or 3 schools, and most districts in the bottom 10 also had 2 or 3 schools, with a few outliers (Quincy, and Yakima). This begs the question: Does the size of the district have a greater influence on performance than student performance?

Data Validation

I looked to see if the number of schools affected the average score for better or worse and found that it did not

Cross-referenced the SQL query results with the results the saw on Tableau to validate the average percentages were consistent. Results were consistent.

Conclusion

With the visualizations we created, we were able to answer the questions we had about this dataset. For next steps, I would want to look further at what Top districts are doing well to support their students, and also look at what factors contribute to lack of Kinder readiness in the bottom performing schools. Some questions I'm wondering are: Do districts with preschool programs perform better? To what degree does socio-economic status contribute to the success of districts? In order to explore these questions and identify any trends, I would need to find a related dataset and join it to the WAkids dataset.

Thank you for reading this summary of our dashboard! If you have any questions or feedback, please DM me on LinkedIN.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelsearles95/

Dataset from: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/report-card-wakids-2021-22-school-year

Tools used: SQL, Tableau

Partner: Jonathan Willis