All right, well, let's get right into it. We sent you a case study of a hypothetical scenario where a school needs to improve its communication with parents, and we asked for basically your top insights into how this can be solved. Can you take me through your thought process? Sure. I just want to say this is such a great scenario. I really enjoyed working with it, and it's something I imagine a lot of schools have to deal with. This is what I came up with. Here's the presentation that I put together, "Bridging the Communication Gap between Teachers & Parents" for Creekside Middle School. The background problem was that there were sporadic or non-existing communication between teachers and parents. The solution that we're trying to come up with is to help the middle school design an app for parents to stay updated on school news and their children's classes and activities. But for our analytical goals, we had two. The first one is, we need to look into the why. Why do we want to create the app in the first place? And why are we interested in keeping parents informed? We want to quantify the impacts of doing that, parental involvement, on student test scores. And then we looked into the how. Once we do decide we're going to create the app, what are parents interested in? What do they want to learn more about? If we dig into the why first, this is what we found. We found that there was a downward trend where students' test scores have been falling since 2004 and that's a problem. The reason is because parental involvement also dropped in 2004 despite there being a 14 percentage point increase if there are parents involved versus when parents are not involved. Basically we think the drop in the student test scores because it correlates so well with parental involvement that the lack of parental involvement is the reason why test scores are dropping, and so that's why it's really important for us to increase parental involvement to improve our student test scores. That's the why. Next we want to go into the how. What are the things that the parents would want to know about? This data comes from a survey in which we asked students what kind of activities that they are involved in, and most student activities can be grouped into the following three categories: sports, academics and extracurricular clubs. And what's interesting is if we looked at the news alerts that's sent out, these are the things that the parents are notified about currently, and broke it down from sixth graders, seventh graders, and eighth graders, we've found that the seventh graders received the least attention. They had the fewest number of news alerts published. What that means, these two data points is that, number one for the categories, we should create three tabs or a way in which we can easily group activities into three buckets, the academic, sports and extracurricular activities. Secondly, because seventh graders were the ones who had the least amount of attention, we would have the biggest amount of impact if we prioritized targeting them during our test launch. In summary, based on the analysis that we did, the why we want to create an app in the first place is because parental involvement is highly correlated with higher test scores. And the how, how to best design this app, when we build this app, we want to make sure the app has three categories or three tabs for each activity category, and we should prioritize a version 1 launch for parents of seventh graders. Here's what a timeline of events could look like. The first two weeks for analysis and then we're presenting the analysis now, and then good chunk of time where you can build the app, and during the testing and iteration, this is where we want to focus on the seventh graders, get their feedback, and then finally we can launch and open it up to all other grades. That's how we can build V1 or version 1 of the app. But we always want to improve. Further explorations or ways in which we can improve for version 2 of the app is, we can look at additional questions like what is the impact of having multiple children involved in the same school? Does that help improve test scores even further? What's the impact of having one caretaker involved versus multiple? Thank you very much. That's all I had. Well, great work Sally. You've really covered a lot of ground for a short amount of time and based on what you've examined, you understood the objective and captured who the client is and what they want and used data and visuals that supported your hypothesis. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you would recommend as next steps? For sure. My recommendations for next steps is twofold. One, we want to share these insights with the person or the team building the app so that they can build an app for parents to easily move between those three tabs, the three activity categories, and two, once we enter the testing and iteration phase, we should prioritize building for seventh graders for the biggest impact. Great, well done. I really appreciate your time on this. I'll take a further look into your presentation and my notes and I'll reach out soon with my final thoughts. Thanks, Jordan. I look forward to it.
