[sims] [SIMS] - scripted whole school graphical view?

[mjervis]

I've just been through SIMs with our HeadTeacher. There is obviously a huge amount of individual pupil data put into the system, but it seems a very time consuming process to extract whole-school or averaged views; for example a graphical breakdown of progress for a cohort across subgroups such as FSM, or cohort APS or threshold level graphs. Something like this:

.. or like the school or FFT dashboard summaries. Is this possible? Has anyone written scripts to access the underlying database and extract & graph the data like this?

Obviously something like SIMs --> Gapminder would be great!

[mjervis]

Of course just being able to script the extraction of the that data such as grade distributions per subject per year, would be useful. This seems like such a common task to want to do and it seems very laborious to do it manually, that someone much have a set of pre-canned scripts for things like this.

[CAM]

Set up one column per subject in Assessment Manager containing the grades entered by teachers. Then you can right click the column header and choose Show Dsitribution by Grade.

 

I think Discover may help with whole school.

[Reverend_Dan]

Have a read of these two thread http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/123696-idiots-guide-report-templates.html and http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/88002-macros-excel-reporting.html

I used these to make a report to chart our merit system in sims. Easiest way i found was to dump the data to a flat sheet then run a macro which generates a pivot table and pivot charts to show the data they wanted.

[mjervis]

Thanks, I'll read through the links. The current situation is that the school extracts the data to spreadsheet; but this involves many clicks through many pages - each subject, each year group etc. It would be great just to run a script to automate this repetitive task. Any other links you have would to scripting multiple data extraction from SIMs would be most welcome. I'd like to go in and help them set something up, but want to get as much research and preparation done as possibile beforehand.

[LosOjos]

I do exactly what @CAM describes. Set up a template that contains all of your aspects you want to analyse, then you can export this spreadsheet to Excel and analyse from there. Make sure to set up your Excel workbook in such a way as that next time, you can just copy and paste in the new data and all of your various formulae and graphs will update automatically. Takes a little time to setup the initial workbook, after that it's 5 minutes to copy and paste.

 

You can of course script automatic data extraction (involves a mixture of SIMS reports and CommandReporter) but to be honest, for the work you'll put in to doing that and verifying the output once you have it, it's much easier to use a summary template.

[DSapseid]

One of our Deputy Heads who is in charge of assessment stuff has recently bough 4Matrix software 4Matrix and its a good bit of software, shows nice RAG ratings for the students and pie charts/bar graphs. Hooks into sims and extracts the data and photos of students and can do print outs of which students are not achieving xyz and print off there photos if some staff cant put a name to face.

 

SLT love it and its just been rolled out to all HOD's.

[tombry]

Prior to my school changing the assessment schedule I set all this up in Discover - works wonderfully, and with the batch creation tool, can be done extremely fast - I think to set up an entire year group only took about 15 minutes.

 

From there you use the various other discover groups to add to the whole school graph, and you can very quickly see how much certain groups are under (over) performing from the whole school average.

 

during the christmas break I'm hoping to get it set up with our new assessment schedule