Introducing Grade reports & Assessments

The assessment module provides our users with an easy to use tool kit in order to create, collect, review, and publish their report cards. With configurable term reporting, you can create your own assessment strategy and publish these straight to the student and parent portals. These can be half yearly, end of year, or simple progress reports on a bimonthly rotation. They may include exams, educator comments, continuous assessments and learning outcomes. 

How to access

Subject administrators, curriculum heads, or school clerks, would have access to the full list of functions in the grade report menu header. The Subject specifications can be known as Curriculum, Learning outcomes, or Learning standards.

Most course Teachers will be limited to Contribute and the Comment templates.

Adding assessment grades to the report card

Created at course level, and can be completed from an individual student list, or from the assess grid.  Use your own scales, weights and objectives in order to customise the final report for your school. This article explains how teachers contribute to the report.

Reviewing contributions

After Teachers have contributed from a course level, someone would need to review these before publishing. In the review page, class Teachers, year heads or central management can review each student individually.

MySchool promotes the steps of Contribution > Review > Publish. Reviewers can either block further amendments or return a students assessment back to the course educators to amend before publication.

Subject specifications

Schools can set their learning outcomes, and configure their assessments for grade reporting. Each subject can be configured differently depending on your schools strategy and curriculum. Gather information from assignments, evidences, or even request student input directly. MySchool assessments are used for a wide range of international standards (Montessori, IB, ES bac, national Sport schools, Further education and more).

Transcripts

The transcripts provide schools an overview for single/multiple students academic results obtained during their time within your institute. Many schools use this for university applications for their final year students, and when the students leave their institute.

Publish

Schools can control the assessment contribution periods both for students and educators. Then once the reports have been reviewed, central administration teams can publish a whole class level in one go. MySchool promotes a paperless system for reports, and once published the students and guardians can download the PDF from their respective portals. 

Comments

Educators and general reviewers can use pre saved comments for the assessments. These work within rich text assessment types and the overview box in review. Automated tags allow teachers to use templates for common feedback messages, and personalise them with adapted pronouns, and adding the name of the student.

Setting up your schools assessment

Although MySchool assessment is simple, we would advise that you gather all stakeholders within your institution and confirm your assessment strategy for the whole year. This does not mean you can't change it, but it allows you to fully understand all the communities needs, and get a clear defined project from the start.

1. Scales, averages, and term weights

Once you have set out the strategy, then start with the building blocks. Create achievement scales, assignment types, and even weight scoring. Make sure your educators understand the logic of the average calculation before entering grades. We can help advise, but it is important that you control the mathematical logic.

2 . Learning outcomes or not?

Are these needed for all levels? Promote the use of assignments/VLE from the start of the year. This way educators can build up a comprehensive list of evidences for their students. If assessments have been entered then we advise not to change the learning outcomes for the subject.

3. Decide on regularity

As part of set up or rollover, terms must be one of the first things to confirm. However, you can always introduce an assessment term into an existing configuration with no problems. Just make sure all the educators who will be require to contribute are aware for the deadlines.

4. Build a test subject/course/teacher/student and guardian

We advise to always have a test scenario, but with assessments it is vital. This will allow you to experiment in different assessment strategies, grade scales, and report formats. In this way, you can create a project group and allow them to make sure the output is acceptable to your whole community.

5. TEST, TEST, TEST, and TEST again

it is important to make sure that the grades and decimals, the scales, the formulas and each assessment type is working as expected. Test and confirm these BEFORE your assessment staff start entering results.

6. Assess

Teachers assess, using either the grid or the list view. You can determine an assessment window and check to see if all contributions have been added before reviewing. Make sure you give your teachers plenty of time to complete this task. This will avoid publishing half empty reports, or republishing whole school levels. 

7. Review

Once assessments have been entered, then we advise to review each report. Sometimes students with non linear enrolment dates may pose problems, and this can be easily rectified at the reviewing stage. it also allows peers to verify comments, and grading scales to ensure there is conformity across the class. Set reports to review to stop any changes from the assessment grid.

8. Publish

When all is complete, you can publish in one go. Depending on the size of the report and the class, this can take the system several minutes. Once completed, spot check a few students and parents to make sure they can download the reports. Then send an announcement informing them of this.