Data visualization tool for student dropouts in Tanzania

Abstract

Education is a crucial sector and key component of many governments’ agenda. Despite that, students dropout has been among the persisting challenges in education, being experienced from basic education levels to colleges and universities. This work presents a study on data visualization in education and a glimpse of data visualization in other domains, and suggests a web based data visualization tool for student dropouts in Tanzania, targeting primary and secondary schools. It also presents users’ feedback regarding the developed web-based tool. This study collected data from the Government Basic Statistics Portal and the President’s Office - Regional Administration and Local Government (PO-RALG). Rapid prototyping was employed to develop the proposed web-based data visualization tool for interactive visualization of the prepared data. Moreover, focus group discussions and questionnaires were used to gather feedback from the users, whereby majority agreed that data visualization is useful for understanding data and providing insights for reporting and decision making. Most users further agreed that the developed tool was easy to use, useful and recommendable. The various challenges that came up during the course of this study enlightens on the need for sound data collection practices and the need for good visualization literacy. The results from this study will be beneficial for decision makers in education domain by providing a wide range of options to visually compare and observe variations in the student dropouts trends, thus facilitating informed decisions. Moreover, this study will be useful source of information for further research in dropout prediction and modelling.