With most schools closed for a month or more due to COVID-19, educators are facing unprecedented challenges in supporting their students. Attendance and Course Grades – two of the metrics reviewed most frequently – may not be relevant for the rest of this school year. But we know that educators are dedicated and resilient. All of our partners are working hard to find ways to continue teaching and monitoring student needs even while school buildings are closed. Schoolzilla is still here to help you track the metrics that matter most, even if those metrics are new to us (and you)!
Our Assessment Template is a flexible option that can be configured to support many types of data,* such as:
- Number of logins/total minutes engaged with digital tools
- Student well-being/social-emotional ratings gathered via teacher check-ins or family /student surveys
- Performance on teacher-created assessments, assignments, or projects
- Number of students who received a device or particular type of technology support
*the platform you are using must provide this data
We can support three types of metrics: proficiency, percent score, or percentile score. Each type can be calculated on an annual or periodic (e.g., weekly, monthly, etc.) basis. Based on the type of data you would like to visualize, we can help provide guidance on which metric type might be best.
For example, say you have a goal around the number of minutes spent working an online learning tool each week (e.g., 100 minutes) and would like to visualize the percent of students on track for login minutes, you could consider requesting a Percent Score Assessment Template metric. The student metric could show the percent of expected minutes completed (e.g., 80 minutes logged in out of 100 minutes expected or 80%). At the district or school level, the metric would display the percent of students who are at or above a threshold (e.g., percent of students completing 60% of expected minutes).
To update this metric, you would populate the assessment template file with the following required values:
- SystemStudentID: The unique student identifier from your student information system. Required for linking data to individual students.
- SystemSchoolID: The SystemSchoolID should indicate the school where the student was enrolled at the time of the activity, and be consistent with the SystemSchoolID provided to Schoolzilla via School Settings. Failing to populate this column will result in all data associated with a school of ‘-----’, and an unknown school year.
- TestDate: the first day of the week being recorded or the date of the file export
- TestType: the minimum information required to identify the system. Ex: Freckle, Dreambox
- TestScore: the number of minutes the student was logged in
- TestPeriod: Required for displaying results on the trend line view in Mosaic. We will use the TestDate value to determine the applicable school year. For example, "Week 1", "Week of April 6", "April"
- Percent Score: the total number of minutes the student was logged in divided by the expected number of minutes.
- TestSubject (strongly recommended): This field is generally useful for reporting purposes and will help us if we need to generate separate metric tiles per subject for the same test type. Ex: Math, Reading
For this example, here are sample configuration options you would also share with us:
- Metric Name: Freckle Learning Minutes
- Metric Definition: Percent of students completing at least 60 of 100 expected minutes on Freckle
- Metric Type: Percent score
- Test Type: Freckle
- Desired Filters: Grades 3-8 only
- Performance Levels: 0-19% = Little/No Usage, 20-59% = Some Usage, 60%-99% = Meeting Usage, 100% = Exceeding Usage
If you'd like to discuss ideas about how to use the assessment template to capture and track alternative data types during your online learning environment, please reach out to your Impact Manager or contact Support.