Prof. Amy Rae Fox
Student Engagement Dashboard
Reimagining Google Forms exit tickets as a dashboard professors can actually act on
Role
UX Research
Learning Science
Information Architecture
Exit tickets are one of the few tools that let a professor hear from every student, not just the ones who speak up. At the scale of a 300-person course, that signal is worth capturing twice a week.
But that signal piles up fast. Professors end up with more data than they can track per student, displayed in a rigid, one-size-fits-all format that doesn't flex to what they actually need to see.
Year
2026
Beyond The Spreadsheet
What's broken about exit tickets at scale?
Exit tickets are a powerful tool professors have at their disposal, a quick pulse check on comprehension, effort, and confusion that can help reshape the very next class. But for courses with 100–300 students submitting responses twice a week, the data becomes unmanageable fast. A single quarter can generate upward of 300 rows and 80 columns in a Google Sheet. Professors are left scrolling sideways through a spreadsheet to find a single student's thread of responses, or manually filtering rows to spot a trend that should be obvious at a glance.
300+ rows per quarter
80 columns per Google Sheet
2× weekly submissions, per student
That means 24,000 cells of information across 6,000 responses per course over the quarter
Google Forms was built to collect data — not to help instructors act on it. Professors care about two things from that data: the class as a whole ("is everyone lost, or just a few?") and the individual student over time ("is this person consistently disengaged, or did something happen this week?"). But Forms treats these as separate problems: aggregate summaries on one side and raw rows of free-response text on the other, with no way to move fluidly between them. Spotting a trend, tracking a student, or connecting a class-wide pattern to an individual response all require manual spreadsheet work that most professors simply don't have time for.
Who is this for?
Our target users are professors who already use exit tickets or mid-class check-ins via Google Forms — people who care about student engagement and have built a habit of collecting feedback, but are hitting the ceiling of what a raw spreadsheet can tell them. They're not asking for a new survey tool. They need a better lens on data they're already gathering.
"The only way I could do that would be searching for that student and then filtering the Google Sheet — and then I'd actually have to scan across 80 columns to find it. It's just really inefficient."
Why does closing this loop actually matter?
The stakes of fixing this feedback loop are real. A landmark meta-analysis of over 250 studies found that formative assessment — the category of practice exit tickets belong to — produces learning gains with effect sizes between 0.4 and 0.7, among the largest ever recorded for any educational intervention. At the high end, that's enough to move an average student into the top quarter of their class. Yet that potential depends entirely on one condition: that the instructor can actually read and respond to the data. When the tool for collecting that data is a 300-row, 80-column Google Sheet, the gap between collecting feedback and acting on it becomes insurmountable — not by design, just by default.
Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). "Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment." Phi Delta Kappan. Meta-analysis of 250+ studies; effect sizes 0.4–0.7 for formative assessment across age groups 5–university level.
More recent research reinforces this. A 2025 study published in Assessment in Education analyzing over 1,000 students confirmed that exit tickets reliably predicted student self-efficacy and engagement — two outcomes that instructors like Dr. Fox are already trying to track, intuitively, through the responses she's collecting. The data she needs to act on is already there. It just isn't legible.
Shehzad, U., Recker, M., & Clarke-Midura, J. (2025). "Exploring the Potential of Exit Tickets as Formative Assessments of Student Affect." Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 32(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2025.2510206
In large courses, anonymity is the default. Research shows that students who perceive themselves as anonymous to their instructor feel less personal responsibility for learning, have decreased motivation, and attend class less (Svinicki & McKeachie, 2010, as cited in HEQCO). Professors like Dr. Fox are trying to push back against that — exit tickets are, at their core, a signal that says I see you, I'm listening. But when the data from those tickets piles up in a 300-row spreadsheet, the signal never completes the loop. Research on large class instruction notes that while an instructor of up to 15 students can interact with each one individually every class meeting, for classes beyond that threshold there is little hope of meaningful student-instructor interaction unless students seek it out themselves (Schaffer et al., 2017). The intention is there. The tool to act on it isn't.
Svinicki & McKeachie (2010), cited in: Teaching and Learning in Large Classes at Ontario Universities — Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) exploratory study. Schaffer, H.E., Young, K.R., Ligon, E.W., & Chapman, D.D. (2017). "Automating Individualized Formative Feedback in Large Classes Based on a Directed Concept Graph." Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00260
How do we make this data usable?
We're designing a dashboard interface that ingests Google Forms exit ticket data and surfaces it in three views professors actually need: a per-class snapshot (what confused people today?), a per-student timeline (how is this student trending?), and an aggregate signal tracker across weeks and quarters. The goal isn't to replace Google Forms — it's to make the data professors are already collecting finally usable.
The dashboard allows for semantic zooming into class data, so the individual student stays visible even at scale. What Dr. Fox wants students to know: you are truly seen and heard in this class.
Why does this kind of problem matter?
The problem was never a lack of data. Dr. Fox had it — twice a week, every class. The problem was that it was structured for collection, not for the decisions she actually needed to make. That's the real design challenge here: not surfacing more information, but reshaping it to match how someone actually thinks and acts.
Personal Motivation
For the past year and a half, I've been working directly with Dr. Amy Rae Fox, a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, through a COGS 199 Special Studies Project on the design of learning. Together we've built artifacts to support student team dynamics, critique sessions, and engagement in her design studio course — COGS 102C. The work sits at the intersection of two things I find genuinely interesting: how people learn, and how the design of tools and spaces shapes the social dynamics around that learning. These questions extend well beyond the classroom — they surface anywhere people need to make sense of information together, build trust, or act on feedback in real time. That's the space I want to keep designing for.
That interest sharpened when I started working closely with Dr. Fox. She runs exit tickets every class — not as a formality, but because she actually wants to know if a reading landed, if a concept confuses people, or if someone is quietly falling behind. That kind of care is rare. But the feedback loop was broken. The data from Google Forms would pile up, unread, in a spreadsheet — not because she wasn't motivated to use it, but because the interface made it genuinely hard. From the students' side, it felt like sending a signal into silence.
That gap, between a professor's intention and her ability to act on it, is the problem we're designing for. It's personal because I watched it happen up close, and it felt solvable.
Work In Progress