jrma91 Posted March 17, 2014 Posted March 17, 2014 Good Morninig All, Our school has recently installed 4Matrix, and I have been asked to "play around" with it for a while to see how good it can be. Having played around on Friday I have been able to get students imported from SIMS into the system, with all of their early GCSE reuslts, not a problem. But now I want to put in our termly assessment data, but cannot find a way how to do it! I've tried using excel but am currently having no luck and getting very frustrated! If anyone has used/uses 4Matrix and knows how to get this in I would be very grateful!! I will also be posting this in the Data Manager group as well. Regards, Jrma91
gazskeltz Posted March 17, 2014 Posted March 17, 2014 Hi Jrma, Assuming you're using SIMS? You'll need a global marksheet with all your assessments going across. Then export the marksheet to excel (formatted) Thee is a hidden column which you will need to unhide. This has the student UPN numbers in. Once that is unhidden, copy all the data to the clipboard. In 4Matrix, use the spreadsheet option and paste in all the data. You'll probably need to split the names to SURNAME Forename. Then Map each of the assessments in turn to the relevant award in the 4Matrix database. Once this is done, save the Map for later use. This should get you started. Hope this helps Regards Gaz
jrma91 Posted March 17, 2014 Posted March 17, 2014 Cheers Gaz, that has really helped! Now onto mapping the subjects to the exam boards!
gazskeltz Posted March 17, 2014 Posted March 17, 2014 No worries, Let me know if you have any issues. Gaz
gazskeltz Posted March 17, 2014 Posted March 17, 2014 No worries, Glad to help... Let me know if you have any issues. Gaz
gazskeltz Posted March 17, 2014 Posted March 17, 2014 No worries, Glad to help... Let me know if you have any issues. Gaz
SouthCoastSaint Posted March 17, 2014 Posted March 17, 2014 I had continued splitting the surname/forename column but forgot last week and lo and behold there is now an option to say it's a marksheet, split it for me. Much better. When subjects are mapped, save the map, saves a lot of time later. And stick to the same column headings each time before you paste then you don't have duplicate subjects to merge when checking subjects in the Admin screen.
gazskeltz Posted March 18, 2014 Posted March 18, 2014 Yes, It's a shame you can't make your marksheet headings the same as the headings in 4matrix - most of them are too long...
ICTLady Posted March 18, 2014 Author Posted March 18, 2014 Definitely save the map of your subjects one you have finished mapping as it saves loads of time. I also have a set of column headings saved in Excel which I paste over the top of the headings in the exported marksheet, so that the column headings on the import are nice simple ones like "Spanish" rather than longwinded SIMS headings with names of result sets etc. Maybe I have missed a trick myself but I found that the initial import saved student details, including KS2 levels, in the year group information, but saved their prior attainment as a series. Then when I created a new series for their Y11 Autumn predictions, the early entry subjects weren't included in the figures as they were in a separate series. Now I keep a saved Excel spreadsheet with students' early entry qualifications. I then add these columns onto the end of my exported marksheet containing their predictions for this summer, and then import into 4Matrix, so that the predictions for their overall attainment are comprehensive. Is this what others do or is there a better way to do it?
gazskeltz Posted March 18, 2014 Posted March 18, 2014 Hi, I actually add the Early Entry results to the template of my master marksheet rather than adding them after....
gazskeltz Posted March 18, 2014 Posted March 18, 2014 Hi, I actually add the Early Entry results to the template of my master marksheet rather than adding them after.... Regards Gaz
SouthCoastSaint Posted March 18, 2014 Posted March 18, 2014 I import from Sims to pull in my early entries, then just add to that series from a spreadsheet for my current predictions.
jrma91 Posted March 25, 2014 Posted March 25, 2014 Thank you all for your help! Having now put my data into 4Matrix, I have one quick question at the moment, does anybody know what the residual. residual vs national and deistribution figures are? Regards, Jrma91
gazskeltz Posted March 26, 2014 Posted March 26, 2014 Hi, This is as I understand it - happy to be contradicted! Residuals compare the result (or set of results) with another set of data. In the Subject Residual page (with the squiggly green line) residuals compare a student result with all their other results at your school. If the subject result is above the green line, they did better in this subject than their average across all other subjects, below the line they did worse. I believe the same goes for National. Hope this helps Regards Gary
CAM Posted March 28, 2014 Posted March 28, 2014 I customised my subject headings to shorten them and printed the list off. It sits on my office wall so I remember what I called them.
ICTLady Posted March 28, 2014 Author Posted March 28, 2014 Yep. The subject residual looks at students' average attainment across all of their subjects compared to their attainment in this subject, for the group of students who took that subject. So, for example, if you have 50 students who took Spanish GCSE, they take the average per subject point score for all of those students across ALL subjects, and comapre it to the average point score for all of those students in Spanish. If it's positive, it means that students have on average done better in Spanish than they have done across the board. The Res v Nat compares the subject residual in your school against the national residual figure for that subject from last year's exam results. So you may find that, for example, the residual for Biology in your school is lower than for other subjects, meaning that students do less well in Biology than they do in other subjects. It's then interesting to see whether that has been the case nationally - whether, in very simplistic terms, Biology is a more challenging subject in which students nationally do less well. The distribution looks at the spread of students around the green line (the green line represents the average attainment across all subjects). Because the residual is an average, it can hide big variations. You couold have a lot of students achieving much higher than their average, and a lot achieving much lower than their average, and the residual would be very small. The distribution tells you how big a spread there is between different students' attainment. There are some decent explanations of this stuff in the teacher and admin guides - I've printed off the relevant pages as a PDF and send them to teachers to help them to understand their subject graphs. It took me a while to "get" what the green line represents and how useful it is, especially in understanding which groups of students are underachieving in a particular group. PS Like @gazskeltz, very happy to be contradicted by any of the DMs here with a better understanding of stats and/or 4M!
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