Key Stage 3 assessment profile with traffic light indicators

The column to the right is their baseline attainment from the previous year the and blue column to the left gives a measure of the amount of progress between that and the most recent assessment to date. The new feature adds a comparison between each assessment column and the one before with Green for improvement and Red for a drop. The result is immediate and effective.

In the above example the profile is working with National Curriculum Levels but the same method could be applied to any assessment scheme designed to show incremental progress over time.

Thanks go to staff in a number of ClaSS schools, including Lynn in Amsterdam and Graham in Prague, who have made suggestions for this new feature.

Now its just as easy to use those comments to communicate with parents, to send home timely information about a student’s activities, behaviour or academic information in school. A “Share with parents” option is now available on the comments form to any staff who have responsibilities at the year level or above.

The option can be used to share comments from other teachers once they have been reviewed for correctness. They are marked as shared in the InfoBook list in ClaSS:

In ClaSSic the same comments are available to parents under the new Comments link:

The comments are displayed for the parent with the profile photo of the teacher posting alongside and with the option to write a reply comment by clicking on the title line:

A Notice can be shared across multiple registration groups by checking them in the list of registers on the Completed Register page. Then press the Notice button at the top to write the message and schedule the day it is to be active. There can be multiple messages added for the same day for the same group if needed.

Recording homework in the MarkBook has two main advantages. First and foremost it helps parents see what homework their children should be doing. It does this by listing the homework details like date due, description and any references through to the the parent portal ClaSSic: you fill out the details when you create the homework column in your MarkBook and the synchronization with ClaSSic does the rest.

Secondly for teachers it allows, at a glance, a comparison of when work was set and collected with the attendance record of each student. So, you know who really did miss that piece of homework because they were out of school.

If you’ve not recorded homework before then here’s a brief instruction sheet: Setting homework guide.

It is expected that form tutors are usually responsible for entering and updating Targets and this is done through the student profile page in the InfoBook. An instruction sheet is attached: student_targets

When: Monday 10^th at 14:30 – 16:00

Audience: Anyone who might associate their responsibilities with the job titles Curriculum and Assessment Manager or Director of Studies.

We’ll look at how assessments are defined and managed in ClaSS, cover grouping assessments into profiles for tracking student progress and learn to make use of the tools for defining the assessment structure for a course for a full year. New features for generating reports from assessment profiles will be covered.

To access the training sites: Group 1 and Group 2

Full attendnace report for a student

The summary button in the register now generates a full attendance report for a pupil. This includes both day-by-day attendance marks for the whole year and some overall statistics for absences and lates. If the same is needed for a previous year or a precise date range then you can use the Attendance option in the Report book.

Subject level analysis of A*/A and A-C performance.

It provides for both student level monitoring of A*/A and A – C grades at regular intervals during the course, and for summary percentages of A*/A and A* – C at subject level.

View the full example of the sheet gcse_attainment_analysis.

Compare with the custom template performing the same function at Key Stages 1 and 2, and it gives an indication of how flexible and powerful the templating system can be.

Options for messaging parents and students

The options are also there to filter the recipients so that only one message is sent per family group or to send one per each contact, so both  mother and father receive the message. The same filter options are also now available when generating address labels.

The email messaging allows an attachment of a reasonable size and its more than recommended that the file is a PDF. If you don’t already PDF then you can grab a free copy of PDFCreator to easily convert any Office document.

Attainment grid for Year 1

Tracking attainment within the MarkBook has been done for a while now by grouping related assessments together as an “Attainment Profile”. Well new charting functionality has been added to these profiles which makes it much easier to get an overview of the results for a class or even a whole cohort. A great example is the chart used at Key Stages 1 and 2 and shown in the screen-shot.

The example plots the results of four assessments over the course of a year for one class where the size of the dots on the grid indicates the number of students achieving at a given NC Level. The progression over the year (going from bottom to top) is immediately revealed by the shift in the dots from left to right with more students achieving higher levels. The coloured backgrounds act as a guideline with white indicating the target achievement band.

The new charting functions allow for many different kinds of plots and even for a degree of interactivity. In case of the KS1 and KS2 grids you can see demonstrated in the training video how this has been used to highlight individual students within the context of the cohort.