Re: [school-discuss] Re: Gradebook project

[Michael Hall <olc@ninti.com>]

Within schools, teachers are free to conduct whatever internal
testing
and recording systems they like, but "official" assessment and
reporting
is done within the state curriculum framework, which is an outcomes
or
competency-based system. Internal testing would normally be used to
inform
the "official" product. The only report that matters in the end, in
terms
of describing where a student's educational development is at, is
the
"official" report. I'm not aware of a system in Australia that uses
a
numerical code for its Curriculum Framework - AFAIK, it is all
Achieved,
Consolidating, Beginning recorded against a stated outcome.

Mind you, schools also send home wordy "reports" describing various
aspects of student performance, but they rarely contain any hard
data of
any kind ... the usual comment is that parents would find the
structure and jargon of the official curriculum document too hard to

understand. It is claimed that most parents just want to know that
"Johnny
is doing OK in English, and not bad in Maths", rather than knowing
that he
has achieved outcomes 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3, etc. Come to think of it,
many
teachers prefer it that way too! :-)

I'm interested in a gradebook type application for tracking student
development within the official framework(s). Good outcomes-based
frameworks properly implemented make planning and delivering
appropriate
content very clear and precise. I have considered implementing a
web-based
application to do so, but there is a rumour that our Education
Department
will soon implement a such a system of reporting on all students
against
our Curriculum Framework. Still, the whole area is an important one
for
educational software worldwide. I guess I was wondering about how
widely
varying reporting frameworks might possibly be accomodated by the
one
application.

Michael Hall

On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, mikee wrote:

> For example:
> >
> > Information Technology Level 3 -
> >
> > 3.1 Outcome: Student can open a web browser and use a search
engine
> > to locate information on the internet.
> >
> > Against this outcome, we would record a value of "Achieved,
> > Consolidating
> > or Beginning". We would also need a way of summarising all such
> > information to give an indication of how many outcomes were
achieved
> > at
> > each level by each student, etc. In addition, we would need to
> > record the
> > location of (or even better, include) hard evidence of the
student
> > having
> > achieved the outcome.
>
> so these grade results are not numerical ?
> are they ever numerical ?
> when not numerical, they could be represented by a pull down list
of options ?
> (with a supporting narrative, and a document location field).
>
> mike eschman, etc...
>

--
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  n  i  n  t  i  .  c  o  m
  data  driven  development
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Michael Hall   mick@ninti.com
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