In my previous blog in the beginning of July, I wrote a little bit about the work that I planned on doing with the Southwest Solutions Adult Learning Lab for my July Impact Project.  Today, I would like to provide you with an update of what work I accomplished with this organization in the past month.

To give you a brief recap, the Southwest Solutions Adult Learning Lab is located in Southwest Detroit, a community which is home to a large Latino population as well as individuals who are Arab American and African American. The Adult Learning Lab serves this diverse community by providing English as a Second Language (ESL), General Education Development (GED) and computer classes to adults in order to help better prepare them for employment opportunities.

Since the Adult Learning Lab is required to produce reports on student data at regular intervals, I addressed the following design challenge question: “How might we make currently existing internal data systems more efficient and easier to use for reporting purposes?”  To accomplish this, I had some in-person meetings at the Adult Learning Lab and Wayne State University’s Harris Literacy Center to discuss the goals of the organization and to receive feedback on the changes I made to the data system. I consolidated and reformatted attendance, test score and student demographic information, which will help make the data system easier to use for reporting purposes in the near future. Together, we are uploading student information before we can take the next step.

The spreadsheet is currently a work in progress and is not complete yet, so I look forward to continue working with the Adult Learning Lab until the project is complete!

Shivani