Reporting (collecting and sharing student data) - finding the balance

[Mark Baldwin]

Hi Data champions, I hope you are all having a restful Easter. I feel this group is an underutilised resource so I thought I'd stick my neck out and throw out a question to the hive 

Reporting - Does anyone think that they have it sorted? or know someone or somewhere that truly does. My need is the secondary context - though feel free to respond in the Primary context as that might help others

This is my starting point

Our data needs to help (in no particular order)
Identify students in need of assistance/intervention
Identify students in need of celebration/award
Identify how much progress students are making
Parents make decisions about their child’s needs
Inform areas for improvement in students, teachers, courses, learning areas and as a school
Enable quality decision making for students, parents, teachers, kaiārahi, deans, HOLA, SLT,  BOT and the ministry

But it also needs to avoid demotivating students and teachers and not take time better spent on other things.

(have I missed something here??)

We currently do real time reporting with comments against assessments in Kamar - to the Portal. 

We do engagement reports 1-4 scale on Classwork, Homework, Organisation and Behaviour 3 weekly

Kaiārahi (tutor teachers) meet junior parents twice per year for 20  minutes

Subject teachers meet senior parents twice a year for 5 minutes.

In many ways our system is very good and it keeps our community happy

But...

- for a five class teacher entering 500 data points in a night (5class x 4indicator x25students) it's easy to lose a little sanity or integrity

- Similarly 5 senior classes x 25 students x 5minutes makes for more than ten and a half hours of uninterrupted interviews.

- The Kamar Portal is so much better than no Portal - but it is very limiting

...and I feel we could do so much better

So Data champions

What do you do or think you should do?

Cheers

Mark

[Edwin Bruce]

Don't forget Google Classroom as a means of "reporting" on what work is allocated and if/when handed in... (to guardians).

[s...@mcneill.co.nz]

Hi Mark,

Will watch with interest.

Talking of under-utilized resources, many/most educators I speak to are not aware of  Welcome to OEA | Open Education Analytics

It's a growing community where best practice is being shared quite openly by educational institutes globally and might provide some insights on how to do things. here is the most recent newsletter:

OEA October & November 2022 Newsletter | Open Education Analytics

Full disclosure - it's backed my Microsoft, but I no longer work for Microsoft so sharing it in my capacity as an educator interested in analytics.

one of the things that really interests me is the use of AI/ML to drive better insighs into data - they recently did a case study with the DoE of Tasmania that does have a video case study:

OpenEduAnalytics/packages/package_catalog/Predicting_Student_Well_Being at main · microsoft/OpenEduAnalytics · GitHub

I think this is increasingly important due to the point you already raised Mark - drain on teacher time entering data. If you can integrate solutions that are already going to be looking a your existing data sets / SMS / LMS etc, then it should in theory reduce teacher time to some extent (well, that's the allure!)

Cheers

Sam

[Jake Wills]

I don't know if what we do is perfect (I know it isn't)... but this is what we do in terms of communication home (Kāpiti College):

Attendance - if a kid isn't at school, they can't be learning...

• Daily emails to students who miss lessons (have ? on KAMAR)
• Weekly attendance summaries to students and parents
• Tutor teachers are sent daily a list of students who have been away for the last 2 days and asked to follow up with home if there hasn't been contact
• Deans get weekly lists of students with poor attendance so they can follow up with any that are needed
• The weekly summary is also embedded in the portal as a custom page.

Academic Reports

• Term 1 we send out reports with 3 tick boxes per subject (Behaviour, Effort, Completion of Work).
• Term 2 and Term 3 Senior reports look like this:
  
  
• Term 2 and Term 3 Junior reports just have the bottom section, and the "results" are reported on the portal (via custom pages) on progress scales for each subject.
• After each set of reports deans and tutor teachers are given lists based on the key competencies (we've changed these this year to be our school values - Parihaka Mai Ai) and who the "best" and "worst" students are, so that they can send congratulations / let's have a chat messages home.

Parent Teacher Interviews

• Term 1 we do "speed dating" with the parents (all levels)... 5 minutes with the subject teachers
• Term 3 we do academic conferences with form teachers and parents and students.

KAMAR Portal

One of the things that I really like about the KAMAR portal is the ability to embed custom pages... allows you to do all sorts of cool things... for example this is our junior reporting:

That's what we do anyway... always love seeing what others are doing, and borrowing ideas!