Education Trust
The Education Trust was established by the American Association for Higher Education as a special project to encourage colleges and universities to support K-12 reform efforts. Part of The Education Trust's mission is to provide research and wide public dissemination of data identifying achievement patterns among different groups of students. The Education Trust came to WebFirst with a goal of creating an advanced “peers comparison” tool to allow policymakers, researchers and journalists to search higher educational institutions. This tool would also dynamically generate advanced line and bar graphs, representing the data by race, gender, and a number of other factors. WebFirst answered the challenge by designing a website that accomplishes the goals set out by the Education Trust.
Behind the website, an algorithm was developed to weight each factor for determining peering between two universities. Comparison factors include: selectivity, carnegie classification, average SAT scores, and minority representation. Together with The Education Trust, WebFirst developed a detailed requirements document and design document.
