Design and Evaluation of Interactive Radar Visualisation of Academic Performance for Parents and Students

This study investigates how parents and students interpret and form continued engagement intentions with a radar visualisation tool designed to present multi-subject academic performance. While data visualisation is increasingly used in education, limited empirical attention has been given to whether parents and students, who share the same performance information but hold distinct roles, respond to visualised reports through similar behaviours. To address this gap, an interactive radar visualisation was developed to present secondary school students’ achievement across subjects with peer reference points. Drawing on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as an analytical framework, this study examines the determinants of continued intention to use the visualisation tool. Questionnaire data were collected from 706 parents and 264 students in a Macao secondary school. Structural equation modelling (SEM) revealed fundamentally different ideas of continued engagement. For parents, continued intention was significantly associated with performance expectancy (PE) and effort expectancy (EE), social influence (SI) and facilitating conditions (FC), suggesting the tool functioned as a decision support system for academic planning. For students, only social influence (SI) and facilitating conditions (FC) emerged as significant predictors, indicating that peer comparison and external expectations may not fit their needs. Parents also reported significantly higher continued intention than students. The finding extended UTAUT by demonstrating that core acceptance relationships are moderated by different roles, reframing technology acceptance in educational visualisation from system adoption to information interpretation. The study provides empirical evidence that visualised performance reporting functions not merely as a data display but also as a communication medium whose meaning is actively constructed by users. These insights highlight the need for role-sensitive design, emphasising actionable planning support for parents and personally meaningful, agency-oriented feedback for students, in order to foster productive home–school communication and sustained engagement with learning information.