[sims] Discover with Assessment Manager

[babatate]

We have a heavily customised set of templates/worksheets/tracking grids etc in Assessment Manager(with our own aspects/mark sets/grade sets etc).

We are looking at whether Discover would help us graph our Assessment Data in a useful way - however all of the literature concentrates on the SIMS data.

I'd love to hear some views about how useful Discover is under these circumstances, thanks in advance.

Barbara

[bobsmith]

You can map your data across to discover aspects and it works reasonably well, but I found it was just too much faffing around on the whole.

 

It is pretty much always faster to pull it out and do pretty things with excel, particularly as it's far far far more customisable.

[garbage46]

my thoughts are the same as bobsmith. It seems like a bit of a faff to get it all set up when a quick export to Excel gives a lot of flexibility.

 

I've not found anything that can match the Venn Diagram functionality of Discover though...

[Esteban_Child_of_the_Sun]

We've found that once set up staff at schools found it useful for filtering their own data for the groups they are interested in. I agree it's a bit faffy to set up but once it is set up it's generally reasonably easy to maintain. I would highly recommend to start by defining what you want to analyse and only make graphs for doing that, otherwise you will quickly end up with hundreds of graphs. I also find the Discover Dynamic Groups very useful for further analysis in SIMS.

[garbage46]

Agreed, Dynamic Groups are very useful indeed.

 

Do you have any sort of dynamic "Persistent Absence" group? I'm not sure how to properly define this group in Discover. Would it be anyone with less than 90% attendance?

[bobsmith]

I've created a PA group in Discover, I'm guessing it works cos i get messages every time a student is added or removed from the group.

 

The trick is to decide what your PA threshold is going to be (current DfE is 90% i think) and make sure that's available on the "Percentage Session Attendance Year to Date" graph.

 

If the boundaries showing aren't what you need, you'll need to go into the Discover Administration utility and customise it.

 

I then dragged my year groups onto the graph and then created a dynamic group by cherry picking the year 7 to 11 columns as I'm not including my 6th form in it.

 

You can add supervisors to the group back in SIMS who will receive the messages about the students in the group.

[garbage46]

cool! I didn't know (or had forgotten) about changing the boundaries in the Admin utility. I guess 10 is the maximum number of bars in the chart?

[bobsmith]

yeah, and the boundaries have to be equally spaced too.