The Our Students page includes recent changes to student data to help your teams monitor progress and determine the best next steps to support students and achieve strategic goals. Along with helpful text to describe the current and prior student data used for comparison users can quickly see the most recent change by individual student metrics across the Our Students page.
Educators will be able to more readily answer questions such as:
- Which of my lowest performing students improved since last period?
- Which students in my intervention group realized gains since last period?
- Which students in a particular risk category saw further decline in outcomes?
Where to See What's Changed
Recent changes are indicated with an arrow and number situated to the right of each student data point. The direction and amount of change is displayed in gray as shown below.
When hovering over a student metric or change value a tooltip displays helpful details including the current value, the change value, and prior data point for the metric in focus.
The tooltip includes four components:
- Metric Label: Displays the label for the student metric used in this calculation
- Current value: Includes the current value with color-coding to indicate whether value is above or below district goal
- Change value: Includes change values with color-coding and arrow to indicate direction and favorability of the most recent changes to student data.
- Arrow indicates whether a result has gone up or down since the prior time period.
- Color indicates whether the result has improved or declined since prior time period.
- Current value detail: Includes additional information about the current metric including description of the metric and the date for the current data point
- Change value detail: Includes the change value and most recent data point used for this comparison
How is Change Calculated?
Change values are calculated against a single, prior data point. Change values represent:
Result in most recent time period - result in prior time period.
- Time period: The time period “granularity” varies by metric. For annual metrics, such as state tests, the comparison is prior year. Monthly metrics, such as attendance and discipline data that are collected frequently, look at the prior month. Periodic metrics for tests, grades and other periodic activities utilize test windows or marking periods.
- Results: A single result from each time period is used to calculated change. In some cases this comparison will exclude data from the current period because only the max or most recent score is considered.
Students with a periodic assessment taken multiple times in the same test window or marking period will only have one score considered for comparison against the last screening window. Here is an example to illustrate:
1) For metrics taking the highest score from each assessment window:
| Fall Reading Assessment | Winter Reading Assessment | Change Value | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Student 1 |
attempt 1 - 90 |
attempt 1 - 92 attempt 2 - 87 |
increase of 2 |
|
Student 2 |
attempt 1 - 91 attempt 2 - 90 |
attempt 1 - 81 attempt 2 - 93 |
increase of 2 |
2) For metrics taking the most recent score within each assessment window
| Fall Reading Assessment | Winter Reading Assessment | Change Value | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Student 1 |
attempt 1 - 90 |
attempt 1 - 92 attempt 2 - 87 |
decrease of 3 |
|
Student 2 |
attempt 1 - 91 attempt 2 - 90 |
attempt 1 - 81 attempt 2 - 93 |
increase of 3 |
What If There Is No Change from a Prior Period?
When there is no change between current and prior data point users will not see arrows or numbers next to current data value. The change metric indicate: "There is no change since [the last data point]." For example:
What If There Is No Prior Data Available?
In other cases, when there is no prior data point available for comparison, users will see the message: "There is no prior data point available for comparison":
Some metrics do not include recent changes at this time due to the way they are calculated; metrics calculated by ongoing, daily accumulation do not include change values. Users should not expect to see change values for Cumulative GPA or Daily Absences, specifically. Recent changes to Suspensions, Expulsions, Office Discipline Referrals and Daily Attendance will be added in an upcoming release.
How Can I Use Change Values to Monitor Student or Group Progress?
Monitoring recent changes to student data can be useful in deciding which students may need additional supports or in monitoring progress for students already receiving additional supports. For example, checking changes in attendance rate each month for a group of students selected for attendance intervention at the start of the school year might reveal some have improved beyond the need for additional support while others require more intensive attention.
In other cases you may want to select a subset of students for additional support based on results in the most recent screening window. By narrowing down students in a certain classroom, or students with scores in a certain range, educators can use the information about what's changed to inform inquiry and decision-making for individual students up to the building & district-level.
Click the following links for more guidance on using intervention groups and filtering, sorting, and grouping students in Schoolzilla.