National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and Arbor Integration

The article discusses the integration between Arbor and the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) for standardized assessments, highlighting the benefits of automatic data syncing, dashboard analytics, and the setup process for schools within a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT). It also covers permissions needed, data management, and how to interpret assessment results.

Standardised assessments are a great way to ensure consistency and validity of progress and attainment judgements across the schools in your MAT.  Take a look at our blog post to see how using standardised assessments could benefit your MAT.

• The integration with National Foundation for Educational Research's Assessment System automatically sends student data to NFER, removing the need to manually remove leavers or add new starters to both systems and reducing the potential for error. 
• In addition to this, student results for NFER assessments are sent back to Arbor and displayed on our School and MAT MIS dashboards. These dashboards allow you to analyse all your core student data in one place at both an individual school and whole MAT level.

As this is a new feature, we're always looking for ways we can improve it to suit our school's and MAT's needs. If you have any feedback, please submit it to our product team here: NFER & Arbor Integration

Permissions

To be able to manage API links you'll need to have the School: User Accounts: Administer permission on the School MIS.

If you don't have the permission, you'll need to ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

 

Set up the integration for the MAT MIS

You will not be able to see any school NFER data until at least one of your schools has set up the integration. So you can see the data from each of your schools, they must each set up their own integrations. The dashboards with then display data for that school. See the section below to see what this will look like.

If you are unable to see school data once the integration has been set up, check that you have an active Data Sharing Agreement with the school. You can see how to set this up here. 

At the start of each academic year, your schools will need to update their integration for the data of each school site to populate correctly on your MAT MIS site. They should follow the instructions in the section below.

Set up the integration on a School MIS site

 

To set up the integration: 

1. Follow the instructions outlined by NFER on their website: NFER and Arbor MIS Integration
2. You'll be directed to the Integration request form, which you'll need to fill out. Each school needs to do this. Top Tip: Person details don't have to be unique across schools, but the person filling in this form needs to have a profile on each school site.
3. Once you submit the form, you'll be taken to the Developer Portal.
4. Log in with the email address and password for your user profile on the school's MIS site.

 

You'll see a list of data that the integration will access. Scroll down and click Approve.

 

You will then be taken to a page where you can complete further steps on the NFER side. NFER will then run a sync to match student records across the two systems using UPNs.

Once you have completed these instructions, you will be able to see the integration is live because it will be displayed in your Arbor MIS. Go to System > Partner Apps (API Users) > Approved Apps. The App will display as NFER Tests in this table.

If you have any issues setting up the integration, please contact the NFER support team on +44(0)1753 637096 or at products@nfer.ac.uk

 

Keeping your integration updated

When is student data synced?

Any changes to student data in Arbor will be updated in NFER overnight. Any new test results available to view in NFER will populate through to Arbor MIS sites the next day. 

When the request is sent, we include a date:

• If there are no standardised assessment marks for NFER for that school, 01/09/2017 is used.
• If there are, but the last sync was unsuccessful, we take the date of the last successful sync, go back 10 actual calendar days and send that date.
• This ensures we bring as much data as we can into Arbor. But don't worry, we don't allow duplicates of the same result to be created.

Updating your integration each year

At the start of each academic year, you'll need to update your integration to make sure your classes and year groups have been updated.

Please see the documentation on NFER's website for how to do this.

How can we remove NFER?

Should you wish to no longer use the integration please contact the NFER support team on +44(0)1753 637096 or at products@nfer.ac.uk.

 

How can I see the data in Arbor?

What subjects and scores are imported to Arbor?

The subjects we import are:

• NFER Mathematics
• NFER Reading
• NFER Grammar & Punctuation
• NFER Spelling
• NFER Grammar, Punctuation & Spelling

For each subject, we import the Total Score, Standardised Score and Age-Standardised Score for each student.

• You can view these on the student profile.
• We also display KPIs for Average Standardised Score and Average Age Standardised Score on the School and MAT MIS dashboards.

Within each subject, there are certain content domains. For example in Maths, Numbers, Space, Shape etc. These are not viewable as KPIs, but can be seen or downloaded from the Attainment section of student profiles.

 

How to interpret the data

To avoid inaccurate inferences being made about differences in performance, NFER recommends that average performance should only be compared where your group contains at least 10 pupils.

To check the group size, you can drill down via the metric or hover over it to review the tooltip.

Please note that the In Year and Year on Year trend analysis use colour coding based on direct score comparisons, rather than indicating statistically significant differences between student groups.

• For In Year trend analysis, data is based on the previous year's cohort. Green means a higher average score compared to the previous year.
• For Year on Year analysis, group performance is compared to the overall score. Green means a higher score than the overall average, while orange means a lower score than the overall average.

School MIS Analysis

You can view all your data for NFER assessments in your Arbor School MIS by going to Students > Assessments > Summative Tracking > Analysis > Overview Dashboard.

The students included in these measures are your students who were enrolled in your school at some point between the beginning of the academic year and today.

You can hover over a statistic for more information.

 

You can click one of the statistics to drill down to see averages for each Year Group, Demographic and Ethnicity.

• The yellow line is the benchmark or average for your school.
• Green denotes that they are performing better than the average.
• Orange denotes that they are performing worse than the average.

 

Click into the In Year Trend and Year on Year to compare figures over time.

• If not relevant in certain term, will show as N/A
• For the year, the most recent data is used. For example when accessing in Spring, data from Spring will be used.

 

You can also:

• Click one of the groups to drill down even further and see a list of students in that group and their mark. 
• Click a name to view individual student data - click their name again to jump to the Attainment section of their student profile.

 

MAT MIS Analysis

You can view all your data for NFER assessments in your Arbor MAT MIS by going to Analytics > Attainment & Progress > Key Stage 1/2. 

You can hover over a statistic for more information.

 

You can click one of the statistics to drill down to see averages for each Cluster, Year Group, Demographic and Ethnicity.

• The yellow line is the benchmark or average across all your schools.
• Green denotes that they are performing better than the average.
• Orange denotes that they are performing worse than the average.

 

You can click one of the statistics to drill down to see averages for each School in the Cluster, Year Group, Demographic and Ethnicity.

• The purple line is the benchmark or average across the schools in the cluster.
• N/A is displayed where no data is available for the school - if they have not completed setting up the integration.
• Green denotes that they are performing better than the average.
• Orange denotes that they are performing worse than the average.

 

You can click one of the groups to drill down even further and see a list of students in that group.

 

Custom Reporting

You can pull your data into Custom Report Writer reports about students on the MAT MIS or School MIS.

Just create a report about Students and use the Third party standardised test Statistics field.

 

You can then see the data, export or download it, or share the report template with other schools.

 

I need further help

If you have any questions about the integration, please contact the NFER support team on +44(0)1753 637096 or at products@nfer.ac.uk

If you have feedback on these features, please add this here: Assessment Integrations