A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master’s in Information and Communication Science and Engineering of the Nelson
Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology
Education is a crucial sector and key component of many governments’ agenda. Despite that,
students dropout has been among the persisting challenges in education, being experienced
from basic education levels to colleges and universities. This work presents a study on data
visualization in education and a glimpse of data visualization in other domains, and suggests
a web based data visualization tool for student dropouts in Tanzania, targeting primary and
secondary schools. It also presents users’ feedback regarding the developed web-based tool.
This study collected data from the Government Basic Statistics Portal and the President’s
Office - Regional Administration and Local Government (PO-RALG). Rapid prototyping
was employed to develop the proposed web-based data visualization tool for interactive
visualization of the prepared data. Moreover, focus group discussions and questionnaires
were used to gather feedback from the users, whereby majority agreed that data visualization
is useful for understanding data and providing insights for reporting and decision making.
Most users further agreed that the developed tool was easy to use, useful and recommendable.
The various challenges that came up during the course of this study enlightens on the need for
sound data collection practices and the need for good visualization literacy. The results from
this study will be beneficial for decision makers in education domain by providing a wide
range of options to visually compare and observe variations in the student dropouts trends,
thus facilitating informed decisions. Moreover, this study will be useful source of information
for further research in dropout prediction and modelling.