Discovery Education is an EdTech company that builds standards-based digital products for K–12 classrooms to support teachers and students. Its Science Techbook platform provides multimodal, standards-aligned lessons built on the 5Es learning model to foster literacy and critical thinking.

However, while the Techbook excelled at delivering instructional content, teachers lacked a streamlined way to assess student performance data, making it time consuming to tailor lessons or identify struggling students early and Discovery Education ran a risk of staying competitive in the ed-tech market.  

I designed an Assessment Dashboard for the Middle School Science Techbook that helps teachers quickly visualize class and student performance trends, identify learning gaps, and adjust instruction, driving a 4% increase in weekly active users.

Reimagining How Educators Visualize Student Progress.

PROJECT DETAILS

Tools: Figma, Figjam, Dovetail 
Web App: Visit Live Web App

Role: Product Designer 
Platform: Web Application

THE PROBLEM

Teachers were unable to clearly monitor student progress across standards, which could impact school district adoption of Science Techbooks.

While Discovery Education’s Techbook provided engaging, standards-aligned content for students, it didn’t offer a way for teachers to interpret assessment data, making it difficult to identify learning gaps, track progress, and connect results back to the lesson content. Since student mastery of standards is a key metric for school districts, tools that fail to help teachers track and improve that mastery can directly influence purchasing decisions. Without clear, actionable assessment insights, districts may view the Techbook as less effective in supporting student success, putting Discovery Education at risk of losing district renewals and new adoptions to competitors offering stronger data-driven reporting tools.

TECHBOOK ANALYSIS

Gaining a foundational understanding of the Science Techbook’s instructional design to contribute more effectively in stakeholder conversations.

Before meeting with stakeholders, I took the initiative to use that time productively. To better understand Discovery Education’s Science Techbook and where the assessment dashboard would live, I conducted a quick content audit. My goal was to gain a data-informed view of how lessons and concepts are organized, and how teachers use the platform for teaching and assessments.

Through this audit, I learned the following:

  • Curriculum Standards: All content must align with state and national frameworks.

  • Instructional Model: The Techbook is grounded in the 5E model and evidence-based pedagogy.

  • Quick Concept Check-Ins: Teachers use these to assess student understanding of newly introduced concepts in real time.

  • Pedagogical Flow: The content supports inquiry-based and project-based learning structures.

This exercise allowed me to enter my stakeholder meetings better prepared, with a foundational understanding of the domain, more relevant questions, and a stronger ability to contribute to productive, informed conversations.

SPEAKING WITH STAKEHOLDERS

Stakeholders expressed a need for a teacher insights dashboard, but vague requirements prompted further research to clarify and refine them.

I met with stakeholders, including a sales and customer success manager, and learned they saw teacher efficacy as central to product value. If teachers can’t easily translate assessment data into actionable insights, it weakens the Techbook’s promise of supporting student mastery, which aligns with Discovery Education’s mission to improve student outcomes through engaging, standards-aligned instruction. At the time, they were focused on the 6th grade science Techbook due to a Texas adoption, one of Discovery Education’s largest district accounts.

From these conversations, I gathered that a dashboard was needed to help teachers access actionable insights from assessment scores, with suggested features like pie charts and bar graphs, primarily to stay competitive in the ed-tech market. However, it wasn’t clear what specific insights were needed or why. Based on my earlier content audit of the Techbook, scores could be shown overall, by standard, or by question, so the requirements were still loosely defined.

I identified early risk areas and gathered initial requirements, planning to validate and refine them through further research, while ensuring the design would fit all middle school Techbooks, not just the one-off 6th grade Texas adoption solution.

RESEARCH

Used past dovetail studies to understand teacher assessment habits and workflow challenges

I faced a challenge that was limited access to teacher feedback for direct research sessions. With only two UX researchers supporting four concurrent projects across the Discovery Education design team, scheduling 1:1 teacher interviews wasn’t feasible.

To keep the design grounded in real classroom realities, I used Dovetail, our centralized research repository, to review past studies on teachers’ workflows with Techbook assessments, such as how they edit, assign, and grade, to helped me better understand their behaviors, habits, and pain points around assessments.

Key Challenges:

  1. Manual progress tracking burden - Teachers had to manually track notes and student progress using spreadsheets and sticky notes, which was especially challenging for grades 6–8 teachers who have multiple classes and students each day.

  2. Grading Workflow Bottleneck - Manual grading of short-answer questions took extra time, making it harder for teachers to quickly see how students performed on assessments. Since teachers often only have short breaks or time before and after school to grade, this delayed their ability to understand student progress and standards mastery.

  3. Supporting student success and equity - Teachers care deeply about helping students succeed to boost overall school performance and access district resources, prepare students for high school coursework, and promote learning equity so all students grasp the material.

IDEATION WORKSHOP

Facilitated an ideation workshop with a SME to validate teacher insights and generate teacher-centered design solutions.

To bridge the gap caused by not having direct teacher feedback, I invited our Curriculum Subject Matter Expert to help inform ideation. I added the persona I created to our FigJam board highlighting my interpretation of middle school science teachers’ key challenges, motivations, and needs, keeping the teacher at the center of discussion, while validating insights in real time. During the workshop, I guided brainstorming to turn pain points into opportunities, encouraging the SME to share real classroom experiences to help helped validate assumptions, align teacher priorities, and generate actionable, teacher-centered design ideas.

Focused on delivering the most impactful features first, giving teachers immediate value while setting up for future enhancements.

DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINTS & TRADE-OFFS

To quickly explore how the assessment dashboard could take shape for teachers, I mocked up an initial concept and incorporated ideas from my ideation session with the Subject Matter Expert. This helped prepare for my design review with my PM and developers.

During the review, developers shared that features like interactive filters, group segments, comparisons over time, and alerts weren’t feasible within our timeline, especially if we aimed to launch by spring, before the following school year.

Rather than cutting essential features, we chose to phase the work strategically:

Phase 1 - Critical Usability

  • Class performance visualization - A dashboard showing mastery levels across standards using coded indicators

  • Basic filters - Focused on high-priority options like class period and assessment type

  • Individual student learning - Quick access to individual student progress

  • Grading capabilities - Seamless grading experience that contributes to overall standards mastery tracking

Phase 2 - Enhancements

  • Drill-down interactions – Deeper insights into standards mastery at the individual student level

  • Performance-based grouping – Ability to group students with similar progress for targeted instruction

  • Advanced filter logic – Include comparisons over time and more refined data views

This gave teachers immediate visibility into trends, struggling students and kept a good workflow, which was the core value they needed to act fast in the classroom, while laying the foundation for more powerful tools overtime.

Choosing a balanced design direction by assessing tradeoffs to ensure the assessment dashboard solution is feasible, and impactful.

BALANCING REQUIREMENTS, TEACHER NEEDS AND FEASIBILITY

I refined two design directions to review with stakeholders for district compliance and developers for technical feasibility.

Concept 1 - Offered high teacher value and actionable insights with lower development and performance risk, but limited deeper data aggregation for teachers so it would require future enhancements to scale.

Concept 2 - Delivers strong teacher and business value with analytics views, but requires heavy development effort and complex data aggregation, increasing timeline and risk.

We moved forward with Concept 1 because it balanced teacher impact, business value, and development feasibility, which allowed us to launch faster without sacrificing critical functionality and set a solid foundation for future enhancements, while Concept 2 shaped the long-term roadmap. 

 NEW REQUIREMENT ADDED

Aligned with stakeholders to understand the new requirement for administrators

I started fleshing out Concept 1 when district stakeholders added a new requirement which was to be able to download student progress reports for administrator meetings. This raised questions about what data to include, how to format it, and if this needed to support different user roles like teachers, administrators, and district staff.

To clarify the request, I set up a quick alignment meeting with the product manager and stakeholder and learned that school principals or district-level instructional leaders needed simple, shareable summaries of student mastery trends. Since they oversee multiple classes or schools, they rely on high-level insights to evaluate teacher effectiveness, assess curriculum impact, and prepare for compliance meetings, without logging into the platform or digging through detailed classroom data. Based on this, I proposed a lightweight CSV download from existing tables, with a more advanced PDF reporting feature planned for the future phase.

VALIDATION

Testing and refining dashboard designs with teachers to improve how assessment data is viewed and used for instructional decisions on student mastery

With the help of the two UX researchers at Discovery Education we were able to run two rounds of remote usability testing with a total of 14 middle school science teachers who actively use the Techbook platform. This approach enabled us to collect timely feedback, iterate between rounds, and meet the launch deadline without overextending the research team’s capacity. We were able to evaluate how teachers navigated and interpreted the assessment dashboard to track student mastery of standards allowing me to uncover usability issues and iterate on designs between rounds to further validate the next round.

Core iterations from this research include:

  • Mastery Visual Hierrarchy - Teachers liked using the pie chart for a quick overview of student mastery but found it disconnected from the detailed table below. I fixed this by placing the mastery visualization at the top with the table centered beneath it and added labeled pills next to percentages for better accessibility.

  • Grading Modal Iteration - The original grading modal entry point was missed by several teachers, and if found, their workflow was thrown off because a grading rubric and associated standards were missing. To fix this, I turned the icon into a clearly labeled “Needs Grading” button in interactive blue. We reallocated development resources from the unused aggregate pie chart from the lesson assessment report, to create a full-screen grading modal, letting teachers grade efficiently in one place and see how the score contributes to lesson standards mastery.

  • Instructional Workflow Support - Teachers wanted to reteach and reassess students without leaving the dashboard, as their workflow involves tracking progress and assigning follow-up assessments. To support this, I added quick actions to reassign or duplicate assessments directly in the dashboard using existing Techbook code and included a date column to distinguish duplicates.

  • Clarifying point distribution - Teachers couldn’t tell how points in the results column were distributed or which questions carried the most weight. To fix this, I added point values next to each question, so teachers can quickly see how each questions points contributes to the total score, reorganized the table for easier scanning, and reintroduced the “Needs Grading” icon for consistency.

  • Icon Clarity - Teachers understood the check marks and red X’s but were unsure about the meaning of the other icons. To clarify, I added tooltips to explain each icon, helping teachers feel confident in what they were seeing.

THE FINAL DESIGN SOLUTION

Designing a Scalable Dashboard Architecture for Evolving Assessment Needs

The final assessment dashboard features a scalable framework with side navigation for the future concept assessments and granular standards progression data, leaving room for expansion. All information fits within a Chromebook frame that schools tend to use due to their affordability and security. The 6th grade Science Techbook assessment dashboard established a framework and hierarchy that easily scaled to 7th and 8th grade assessment content, after the rollout for the Texas adoption.

DELIVERY AND IMPACT

The assessment dashboard sped up reviewing student performance and tracking standards mastery, boosting weekly active users by 4% and grading speed by 22%.

During QA, I worked closely with developers to ensure the dashboards table, interactive elements and intended visual hierarchy was consistent with the designs. We launched the Discovery Education’s first Assessment Dashboard on time for the high-priority Texas district adoption, with a scalable design that would be extended to 7th and 8th grade for future rollouts. After launch, teachers reported that the dashboard reduced the “back-and-forth” between lesson content and assessments. Weekly active users increased by 4%, and the workflow for grading short-answer assessment questions to view complete assessment data became 22% faster.