Designing a Data Visualization Dashboard for Pre-Screening Hong Kong Students with Specific Learning Disabilities

Abstract

Students with specific learning disabilities (SLDs) often experience reading, writing, attention, and physical movement coordination difficulties. However, in Hong Kong, it takes years for special education needs coordinators (SENCOs) and special-ed teachers to pre-screen and diagnose students with SLDs. Therefore, many students with SLDs missed the golden time for special interventions (i.e., before six years old). In addition, although there are screening tools for students with SLDs in Chinese and Indo-European languages (e.g., English and Spanish), they did not provide a student data visualization dashboard that could help teachers speed up the pre-screening process. Therefore, we designed a new visualization dashboard for Hong Kong SENCOs and special-ed teachers to assist them in pre-screening students with SLDs. Our formative study showed that our current design met teachers’ need to quickly identify a student’s specific under-performing tasks and effectively collect evidence about how the student was affected by SLDs. Future work will further test the efficacy of our design in real life.