SDT Data Tool

Team Members

• Eileen Kang (MOE ITD)
• Nicholas Lim (GDP)
• Soong Yi Ning (GDP)
• Goh Jun Hong (GDP)
• Chua Wen Hong (GDP)
• Shaina Tan (GDP)

Problem Statement

HMW provide school leaders and teachers with a streamlined and flexible solution to access timely and comprehensive student data insights, enabling efficient decision-making, early identification of high-needs students and targeted interventions.

Problem Formulation Process

After speaking to some school leaders at the Hackathon Kickoff Bazaar, we gained a preliminary understanding of the challenges schools face in accessing timely and comprehensive student data. The process is manual and time-consuming, leading to less efficient decision-making and less targeted student support.

To deepen our understanding of the problem and use cases, we conducted in-depth interviews with 3 school leaders and 9 key personnel from 4 schools, focusing on three key areas:

1. What student insights are most important to schools?
2. Biggest pain points in using student data
3. Feedback on our prototype

From our user interviews, we uncover that

• Data exists but is scattered across multiple sources
• Beyond official records, informal insights matter—teachers rely on informal remarks, engagement observations, and student well-being surveys to get a fuller picture of students.
• No standard approach to consolidating insights—schools need data for varied use cases. It could be scheduled situations (reporting, termly meetings) but also ad-hoc situations. The required insights vary by context, with different scenarios demanding different criteria and data points to highlight students. Flexibility is key.

These insights led us to refine the problem statement.

Original:

School Leaders need to provide school leaders and teachers with timely, comprehensive, and easily accessible student data insights when making decisions about student support, intervention and opportunities to help students do better in school

Refined:

HMW provide school leaders and teachers with a streamlined and flexible solution to access timely and comprehensive student data insights, enabling efficient decision-making, early identification of high-needs students and targeted interventions.

Solution

Our user insights suggest that if schools can easily consolidate disparate data sources and identify students using customisable parameters, they can quickly extract meaningful insights tailored to their needs.

Our team’s proposed solution is a data tool that enables users to:

1. Consolidate data from multiple disparate reports
2. Select data and set criteria based on school’s unique needs and use cases
3. Quick and simple visualisation to highlight students

Impact & Outcomes

1. Reduce time taken to consolidate data and identify high-needs students

   “With SDT tool, we can consolidate and see at one glance what kind of support is needed and customise the support accordingly. Otherwise, there are so many platforms that we need to check.” -- Year Head

   “This pulls together multiple reports and visualizes the cohort. We can select the key factors to highlight. This way, I can see immediately who needs closer attention, so it’s really helpful.” -- Year Head

   “Previously, there's a lot of documents that you have to toggle back and forth, but with SDT tool everything is under one roof, making it easier. That means we do not need to look at different files to identify students who need support.” -- Vice Principal

2. Leverage data to provide targeted support for students

   “At a glance, I can see all these little details. This can help us think about how we can better support and how we can customise that that kind of support” - Year Head

   “By combining data, we can inform form teachers of key areas to address. Then they have some levers and handles on how then to support this group of students.” - Vice Principal

   “With this composite picture - usually teachers one by one need to go into different systems to check- But if we already have this, then we know the student’s interest and strengths to leverage and support him.” - Vice Principal

Future Steps

Our team will continue to engage with relevant stakeholders from MOE to further develop the product:

1. Prioritise and make enhancements based on user discovery findings
2. Gather requirements and guidelines from relevant stakeholders
3. Pilot the product with schools