This article will walk through what a Heatmap is and how to read the report.
The Heatmap and other reports are available to all users who have been included in the Share Results permissions within the Pulse set up. Note: Users only see data within their visibility. (i.e. District admins see all students, site admins see only students in their building and teachers see only students that are in their classroom.
So, what is a Heatmap?
A Heatmap is a color-coded table that will instantly draw your eyes to the highest and lowest scores as well as provide other visual cues as to where scores sit.
One of the most powerful ways to understand your survey results is via our Heatmap report. Heatmaps let you visualize results by any demographic to quickly uncover outliers and show you where to focus your efforts.
Typically you'll generate Heatmap reports for an organizational demographic such as race/ethnicity or school; however, it is possible to create heatmaps for any demographic we pull from your Student Information System (SIS).
- School heatmaps are a great way to identify schools that are doing well and schools that could use additional support.
- Gender, Race/Ethnicity and Grade Level heatmaps give a view of diversity and where there may be inequity.
- Program heatmaps provide a view on particular cohorts within the school or district.
The Heatmap report is available to all admins, in addition to people who have been given access to the results. The results each user sees is based on their visibility/permissions--meaning a district admin will see data for the entire district and a school admin will on see data for their school.
Navigate to the Heatmap Report.
1. Select a demographic from the Group By dropdown in the top left. NOTE: The heatmap initially shows factor results by presenting each demographic group as a Percent Favorability from the aggregated scores.
2. You can view the results for Questions associated with a particular Dimension by clicking the View drop-down in the top left.
The Heatmap Report is designed to highlight the biggest differences in results for particular demographics when compared with the aggregated results. Note: The Heatmap colors are always based on the favorability from the first column. The most positive differences are highlighted blue and the most negative differences are highlighted orange.
As the difference between a group and the aggregated results gets larger, the shading gets darker. It is designed as a visual cue to call out large differences between groups, so that you do not have to read through every single cell in the comparison grid. You want to focus on the questions and the groups that show darker shades (i.e., larger differences) as these reflect students with different experiences.
1. The numbers in the colored cells are the percent favorability for the dimension/indicator or the question (depending on which "view" you have toggled).
2. The grey numbers in the column headers represent the participation for the respective populations
- Looking at the demographics you have available in your survey, identify two or three that your leaders will be most interested in seeing a breakdown for (e.g. School, Grade Level, Race/Ethnicity, Gender).
- Within these demographic splits, are there any groups that stand out as particularly high or low?