Malta - How to build assessments with SBA's

With the introduction of School-based assessments, you can easily track yearly ongoing assessments, keep students and parents informed, and use them as part of your grade reports. Using assignments and subject specifications, we can cover all your needs.

Our suggestion is to use assignment types to track these during the year. At reporting time, we can pull the Assignment average for these types and add them to a formula for a final year mark. Here the steps to build this.

How do you want to represent your SBA's on the report card?

An important question to address, before you implement this system. When you create an assignment, it is mandatory to add a type is needed (e.g. Classwork, homework, SBA). The options available are;

• One assignment type for all SBA's
• Break down into topics (Reading, Writing, SBA 1,2,3 etc).

Encourage your Educators to use assignments for continuous assessments

It helps to build engagement with your guardian and student community. It can help with Parent-teacher evenings, as both parties will have access to the progress during the term. It allows educators to coordinate the workload of the students. 

They can see the previous year's grades as well

Guardians and students can access historic years using the My Courses dashlet. 

Choose a normalised average ACROSS assignment type

Choose the normalise across assignment types to have the closest to the mean average for your SBA assignments. Make sure your educators understand how individual assignment weights affect this calculation.

Don't worry if each type has a different weighting for the final assessment mark, this will be taken into consideration when we build the formula.

Step 1: Setting up the types

Go to assignment configuration and add the type(s) you have determined. Include them in the average and make them active. Why not add a colour which will show on the grade grid, and help Educators organise their work easily?

Don't forget that the Assignment average shown to students and guardians will show all assignment types ticked to be included in the averages. If you only want them to see the SBA average then uncheck this box from other types. 

Top tip: Why not enable topic folders to further help group SBAs together.?

Step 2: Create the SBA assignments

Create the assignments, and give a full description with links to further reading. Add attachments for them to download. All these elements help the student plan ahead. 

1. Select the correct type

2. Add a full description

3. Decide whether to give students a heads-up or drip-feed their content with a deadline. Use the unpublished until date.

4. Create a topic to group your SBA's all together on the grade grid.

5. Add attachments to help the students with further reading tasks.

Other suggestions would be to open up submissions so that students can submit their final work. Why not add a forum and encourage debate around the SBA from the course cohort?

Step 3: Create your assessment build

Create an assessment build per exam term. 

The assignment average can be pulled per term for both is schedule and is exam terms. It will calculate the average per assignment type during the term dates. So in essence the end-of-year summary which starts on the first day of school, and ends on the last day of school will calculate for ALL SBA's during the year. Add a mid-year exam term if you need to.

Choose assignment average or assignment average with override. You can include any other type of assessment like learning outcomes or text comment fields.

If you wanted to translate the numeric assignment average into an achievement scale, then why not select a calculated scale option?

Open the cog icon on the assignment average line for the advanced options.

1. Set the correct term to pull and show this assessment. 

2. Set the scale (out of). All averages are out of 100%, but if you wish to visually represent a portion for the final year average, (i.e., each term has 25+25+25+25 so that the final SBA score will be shown out of 100)

3. Don't forget to select only the School-based assessment type to be pulled into the assessment report.

4. Build for each publishing term.

Step 4: Calculating the final end-of-year global mark (Assessments + Final exam grade)

For the final year report card, you will need to pull a year-long SBA assignment average or create a formula for each individual term using a stated term grade. You will need either a formula of exam grades or a straight exam grade.

Let's break this down into case studies;

Case 1: We have a year-long term average, and only one exam grade is needed.

• Assignment average = Year long term, Assignment type: School-based assessments
• Grade = Year long term
• Formula = Year-long term assignment average with weight (30 or 40) + Exam grade with weight (70 or 60).

The formula should be set as below;

Case 2: Mulitple SBA's and mulitple exam grades

If you would like to show each SBA score from each term and have an exam paper made of multiple parts, you can follow the below set up;

• Each term will just show an AA Avg score for school-based assessment assignment types
• Stated term grades = Source term + AA Avg from source term (1 per term)
• Formula with appropriate weights to each term (in the example 25/25/25/25)
• Grade fields for each component
• Formula with each component and their respective weight
• The final formula to use the sum of the SBA total formula and the sum of the exam paper with an appropriate weighting