![]() Panorama has also invested heavily in improving survey science. The survey reports allow teachers to see if they’re connecting better with boys than with girls, or if students who have trouble with English are having more difficulty in a classroom than those who are native English speakers. Teachers can dig into how they performed on a question-by-question basis, and they can monitor their performance by subgroup. Panorama also hired a team of software engineers and statistics experts to create a kind of analytics “dashboard” for schools - an interactive panel of graphs and charts that presents practical information teachers need in a comprehensible, rather than overwhelming, user interface. ![]() The firm says its surveys and analytics services are about half the price of older survey methods. For instance, to reduce the costs of its surveys, Panorama created its own scanning system, which allows it to print and collect students’ answers on regular paper, rather than the expensive bubble-scan sheets more commonly used for collecting responses. ![]() Some of its innovations sound small, but they have been instrumental in making its surveys more widely accessible than older educational survey methods. And its increasing popularity suggests that techniques pioneered by the tech industry - including the collection and analysis of large troves of data - may help address problems in American education. Panorama has followed the model of Uber and Airbnb in using the unconventional methods of tech start-ups to reinvent industries that have long been seen as tech backwaters. The company, which is run by two 23-year-old Yale grads with a penchant for computers and data crunching, has run surveys in more than 5,000 schools, and it has been adopted by some of the largest school systems in the nation, including the Los Angeles Unified School District and schools in Connecticut. Panorama is trying to assess how well teachers are doing by conducting scientifically valid student questionnaires that collect data about a variety of factors that might affect a teacher’s performance, from how well she conveys the material and whether she encourages interest in a subject to whether a school fosters a sense of belonging for students. “I wasn’t scoring where I wanted to with questions like ‘I feel comfortable asking my teacher for help’ or ‘My teacher really cares about me.’ I was below average, and I don’t want to be below average.” ![]() Campbell, who is white, said in a recent interview in her classroom. “It’s a very different population from where I grew up,” Ms. Ninety-six percent of the students at Lionel Wilson are Hispanic, and 92 percent receive school lunch assistance. Campbell and her fellow teachers at the Aspire Lionel Wilson Preparatory Academy were scoring at or above the average for Aspire, a charter system that runs more than a dozen schools in California and Tennessee.īut the survey, conducted by a tech start-up called Panorama Education, also indicated that her students did not believe she was connecting with them. Halfway through the last school year, Leila Campbell, a young humanities teacher at a charter high school in Oakland, Calif., received the results from a recent survey of her students. ![]()
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