Graphing your Student's Progress on Goals

Not all the new features we do are a result of a request from one of our therapist-users;  sometimes one of us just has an idea for something we think would be really cool.  The feature I want to tell you about today falls into that category.

We've always thought it would be neat to provide some graphing abilities to therapists within the website so they can easily visualize things like student progress over time or time spent with students.  Now we've taken the first step in that direction by experimenting with a chart that's built into your caseload as of last night (10/20/2009).

This graph is a result of the design efforts of Collin Swearingen, who many of you know as the friendly first point of contact.  Collin and I were talking last week about maybe doing charts for therapists, and I asked him to design the graph that would be most useful to therapists soonest, so we could start playing with the idea.  He came through with a great concept, and now I want to show it to you.

First of all, this graph applies to quantitative student progress.  In order to use it, you'll want to be focusing on a student for whom you've kept this kind of data through therapylog during the documentation process:

Let's start by going to your caseload.  On your caseload, you should see every student you work with.  For the purpose of this graph, think of a student for whom you've kept quantitative progress data, and click on his/her "Student Goals" link:

This will take you to the student goals page for that student, where you should notice something different.  Namely, the goal names are now links:

Just click on the name of the goal you want to graph progress for, and a chart will popup as an overlay:

Cool, huh? On the y-axis, you can see the percentage of success for each appointment.  Each point on the graph represents one session that student went through for that goal (where quantitative progress was kept).   Hover over any point to find out the date of that service:

Also note the dates at the top of the chart.  The range defaults to the last month, but you can edit the dates to be whenever you want.  Anytime you edit a date, the chart will automatically redraw itself for the new date range.

So there it is, an experimental new feature that we want to hear from you about.  Do you like it?  Or not?  Would you change something to make this chart better?  Are there other places you'd like to see charts like this come up?  Or do you have other ideas for ways to make your data more accessible?  We want to hear about it, so leave us a comment!

~Ethan