Comprehensive evaluation of an educational information management solution for parents: Mystudentscope

Abstract

Existing electronic student information systems used by schools were designed from the perspective of the educators or students, not the parents. Parents and caregivers have challenges optimizing their use of information regarding their children’s education (Matthews and Feng 2017). To address this challenge, we developed MyStudentScope (MSS), a web portal that aims at assisting parents in managing information regarding their children’s education. MSS has four primary functions to aid its users in accessing and analyzing collected data: monitoring, retrieving, communication and decision making (Matthews et al. 2018a). A preliminary study was conducted to compare the effectiveness of task completion between the MyStudentScope (MSS) web portal and the traditional paper-based methods by simulating situations parents/caregivers may encounter related to their children’s education and extracurricular activities (Matthews et al. 2018b). Although the small group of participants from this study provided an indication of the effectiveness of MSS versus paper, a study with a larger group of users was needed to further validate the results. For this reason, we decided to conduct another study based on the lessons learned from our prior user study with a larger sample size using a refined version of MSS with improved design in several key functions. Detailed results from this study, the implication of the findings and future research are reported in this paper.