Secondaries: Set up key measures of students above, at or below with School Assessment Measures

School Assessment Measures (SAM) can be used to create bespoke rules for one or multiple assessments combined within an academic year to display at-a-glance charts on your Summative Assessment Overview Dashboard. With this feature you can:

  • Set up different rules for each of your year groups, or one rule for all students in the assessment
  • Display the key measures on your Dashboard, plus you can see and download other measures from the All Measures tab
  • Drill down to see statistics by year, demographic and ethnicity, and take further actions with students, such as adding them to an intervention

 

Permissions

To set up measures you'll need the School: Assessments: Administer permission. If you don't have this permission, ask your admin team to assign it to you.

 

Setting up your measures

As well as copying over your assessments each year, you'll also need to decide which school assessment measures you'd like to have. There's no need to set up new measures (unless you've changed your assessment setup) - you can quickly copy your measures over from last year!

Copy your measures from last year

Copying a measure from last year

Go to Students > Assessments > Annual Policy > School Assessment Measures. To copy a measure you had last year, click the green Copy measures from button.

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If you don't have any measures set up this academic year that you can copy over, you'll see the button is unable to be selected.

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If you haven't yet already copied your assessments over to the next academic year, you won't be able to create measures for them or copy your measures over from last year. To copy your assessments over, see this article.

You'll see this information in the Errors section.

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To select the measures to copy over, tick the boxes next to the assessments then click the Copy to button.

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The measures with then appear on the Students > Assessments > Annual Policy > School Assessment Measures page and on your Assessment Overview Dashboard.

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Setting up a new measure

If you've set up new assessments or didn't create a measure last year, you can set up a new School Assessment Measure.

Step 1 - Set up the measure

Go to Students > Assessments > Annual Policy > School Assessment Measures. To add a new measure, click the green Create new measure button.

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In the slide over, add the name of the measure and whether it should display as a Key measure on your Overview Dashboard. Select whether it should use the student's current grade or target for the year to calculate whether the student is included in the totals.

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Next, select which assessments the measure should consider:

  • Use the in all the assessments field to look at marks in all the assessments selected in this field. For example, put 2 assessments in this field to only look at students who have achieved the mark in both the assessments.
  • Use the and in one of these assessments field to look at marks in at least one of the assessments selected in this field. For example, put 2 assessments in this field to look at students who have achieved the mark in either assessment.
  • Put assessments in both boxes to use a combination of this logic. In the example below, the measure will look at students who have achieved the grade in Maths, and in one or both of the English assessments.

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Finally, select whether an upwards trend is positive or negative.

  • If you will be trying to increase the percentage of students achieving the grades chosen e.g. if your measure looks at the number of students passing English Literature and English Language, set your upwards trend as positive. Then if the percentage of your students achieving the grades increases, the analysis pages will display your results in green.
  • If you will be trying to lower the percentage of students feeding into the measure e.g. if your measure looks at the number of students not passing Maths, set your upwards trend as negative. Then if the percentage of your students achieving the grades decreases, the analysis pages will display your results in green.

Then click Create measure.

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Step 2 - Set up rules

You will then need to add assessment rules for the individual assessments you have included. Click the Add new assessment rule button.

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Select the year group the rules apply to, or leave the field blank to apply the rule to all year groups (useful if you use a flat grade scale).

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Then select your measure rules. The grades available will be based on the grades you currently use for the assessments you have selected. Select an option for each assessment for 'they should be':

  • Achieving below - identify your students who are struggling and take action.
  • Achieving or Achieving at least - identify your students who are passing requirements or who are gifted and talented.
  • Achieving above - identify your students who are gifted and talented.

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Your set of rules with then display. You can create another rule for a different year group if needed, just add a new set of rules and select a different year group. The resulting statistics will be an aggregate of the two sets of rules.

Please note, you cannot set multiple rules for the same group of students.

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You can edit the measure name, whether it is a key measure, what constitutes an upward trend, and the rules. Just click an arrow icon, update the information, then click Update measure.

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If you need to change whether a grade or target is used, or the assessments used, you'll need to delete the measure and set it up again.

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Analysing your measures

Statistics of the percentage of students meeting these measures can be seen in Students > Assessments > Summative Tracking > Analysis > Overview dashboard.

If you have not yet set up any measures yet, you'll see this message - follow the instructions in the sections above to set up your measures for this year.

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Headlines and Key Measures

If you have set up assessment measures already, the page will display statistics about your measures.

In the Headlines tab, you can see the measures you marked as a Key Measure during setup.

The example below shows a positive upward trend of what percentage of year 10 and 11 students are achieving at least a grade 5 in Science and Maths.

I can see the percentage of students achieving this has decreased since the last assessment period, and so the measure is coloured orange.

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By clicking into the All Measures tab you can see all your measures, including those not marked as a Key Measure. You can download this data if needed.

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Drilling down into your assessment measures

Click into any measure to get more information broken down by year, demographic and ethnicity.

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Taking a closer look at the By Year Group section, you can see a breakdown of the achievement by year.

A green bar shows that the percentage of students meeting the criteria is greater than the average for all students. An orange bar shows it is below the average.

On the right-hand side, you can see by what percentage the value has changed since the last assessment period.

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Click the In Year Trend button to see what percentage of students were meeting the criteria for the previous assessment periods in the year.

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Click into a student group to drill down even further to see the individual students making up that group and their marks.

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Examples of measures you can set up and their settings

Students achieving certain grades

Students achieving a certain grade in one subject, e.g. at least a 4/5 in Maths

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Students achieving a certain grade in all of the selected subjects, e.g. at least a 4/5 in English Literature and English Language

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Students achieving a certain grade in at least one of the selected subjects, e.g. at least a 4/5 in English Literature or English Language

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Students achieving a certain grade in one subject and at least one of the other selected subjects, e.g. at least a 4/5 in Maths, and also at least a 4/5 in English Literature or English Language 

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Students not achieving certain grades

Students not achieving a certain grade in one subject, e.g. below a 4/5 in Maths

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Students not achieving a certain grade in all of the selected subjects, e.g. below a 4/5 in English Literature and English Language

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Students not achieving a certain grade in at least one of the selected subjects, e.g. below a 4/5 in English Literature or English Language

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Students not achieving a certain grade in one subject and at least one of the other selected subjects, e.g. below a 4/5 in Maths, and also below a 4/5 in English Literature or English Language 

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Students achieving certain grades in one subject and not another

You can set up additional types of measures that look at students who are achieving a certain grade in one subject but not another e.g. at least a 4/5 in English Language and below a 4/5 in English Literature.

However, please note that you will not be able to analyse improvement in results over time properly as you cannot set upwards trends individually.

  • If you set your upwards trend as positive, in this example when more students are achieving below a 4/5 in English Literature this will count as an improvement
  • If you set your upwards trend as negative, in this example when more students are achieving above a 4/5 in English Language this will count as a worse performance

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Students achieving at least one grade 

You can set up a measure to look at students who have at least one instance of a certain grade in any subject. Add all your subjects to the ...and in one of these assessments box.

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What measures are not possible to set up?

You can't set up measures tracking student grades/targets across all subjects, because students will be taking a different combination of subjects. This means you cannot create measures for:

  • Students achieving or not achieving the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) at grades 4 or higher or 5 or higher.
  • Students who have a certain grade combination in their subjects e.g. AAA at A-level
  • Grade 9-4/pass in all their subjects
  • Students who have no passes in any subject
  • Average Points Score (APS)
  • Value added
  • Students entered

You also cannot set up measures looking at which students have achieved grades/targets between certain grades, e.g. between a 4 and a 6. This is because you can only set up one rule per student group.

 

 

FAQs

How can I delete a measure to remove it from the overview dashboard?

Go to Students > Assessment > Annual Policy > School Assessment Measures.

Select the measure then click Delete assessment measure.

Can I change the order of my measures on my Overview Dashboard?

School assessment measures are ordered based on the order they were set up in. If you want to change the order, you'll need to delete them, and set them up again in the right order.  

My measures are not including certain students

For your School Assessment Measure rules to work correctly, we recommend checking in the marksheets that these fields have been filled in for each student:

  • A baseline for the current academic year
  • A mark entered for the current assessment period for all the assessments used in the measure
  • A mark entered into the column the rule is based on e.g. if the rule is based on Year Target make sure the student has been given a Year Target
Which students are included in School Assessment Measures?

For a student to be included in a school assessment measure they must be these three things:

  • Linked to the assessment(s) chosen in the School Assessment Measure
  • In a year group a School Assessment Measure rule has been set up for
  • Enrolled in the school on the date selected in the filters

Want to see the figures including your leavers? Just click into the filters at the top of the page and untick the Only current students box. Please note that this does not apply to integrations shown on this page such as Hodder.

Which marks are included in School Assessment Measures?

The marks included in the measure are the marks input into the assessment period running on the date selected in the filters, for example in February it will show assessment marks from Spring. 

  • Blank marks are included in the calculations. For example, you have 100 students and 1 of them has no mark. The rest of the students are meeting the measure. In this case, your measure will read 99/100=99%
  • Not required marks are not included in the calculations. For example, you have 100 students and 1 of them has been marked with a non-submission reason. The rest of the students are meeting the measure. In this case, your measure will read 99/99=100%

If the measure takes into account more than one assessment, the assessment periods of the first assessment in the measure will be used - in this example, Reading. If the date selected is not within an assessment period, the measure will display as N/A.

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Comments

4 comments
  • Hi Jamie, we'll need to take a look at your site for queries like this - please get in touch with us via email.

    0
  • hi gwyn,

    we have set all of ours up, but they are all grey. why is this?

    0
  • HI - Can a rule be set up which would tell us if students are below target in 4 or more subjects. I've read through the article but can only see the rule that sets up if they are below in 1 of the subjects listed.

    Thanks

    Sharon

    0
  • Hi Sharon, this wouldn't be possible using School Assessment Measures I'm afraid. For more detailed analysis, you may need to export the marks and do the analysis outside of Arbor.

    0

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