The Effect of School Report Card Design on Usability, Understanding, and Satisfaction

Education policymakers view transparency and accountability as critical to the success of schools. To support these goals, the District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has developed an online school report card for communicating information about the characteristics and performance of schools. To support OSSE's interest in making report cards more usable, this study assessed the effect of different designs on how easy the report cards are to use and understand, how easy it is to find information in them, and whether users would recommend the site to others.