A Stick in the Sand

A better reporting tool

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 11:24:00 -0800

We're searching for a better student information system (SIS) and reporting tool and have had over the last several weeks a number of demos none of which have been very impressive. They all reflect a number-crunching mindset and even boast how they can average and weight marks. Some will do curving, or more sophisticated manipulations, some drops, some standards-based grading. (Not to mention none really accommodate an IB school's needs.) But all have a common problem in that they view assessment as a discrete moment, or accumulation of moments, in time--snapshots of student ability or capacity. So we see gradebooks as essesntially spreadsheets with a long row of numbers, one for each moment, for each student.

The problem with moments is that they are fleeting. Human beings don't exist in moments; they are always becoming. The long rows of numbers only describe what was, not what is or will be.

Don't get me wrong. I like data and to be sure there is a correlation between past scores and current and future behaviour. But that's difficult to pull out with a quick look at a gradebook. (Teachers probably don't really need to look--they know or ought to know what their students are doing anyway.) And practically speaking it's impossible for a department head or head of school to get a quick look at how all the students in the school are doing.

I'd love to see a gradebook tool that ported data to a dashboard that created small graphs, like sparklines, showing student performance that would sit in a window on my laptop or maybe even become an app on my iOS or Android device. The same data/apps could be shared with parents.

From there we could aggregate data for classes, grades, gender--you name it--with yet more sparklines so department heads and upwards can get current and accurate pictures of how the whole school is performing or how a school-wide initiative, say a writing program, is working. It would be an easy thing to add in triggers so when the performance of a student or group of students starts trending downwards or spikes up the program would flash an alert.

The tiny graphs emphasize trends over moments, which I submit is a much more useful perspective. They also reinforce in a quiet but important way that learning is not about achievement, but about continuous growth. That's what we mean when we say we are creating lifelong learners, yes?

A Stick in the Sand

A better reporting tool

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