In this tutorial, we will change assessment data for students, and then modify assessment schemes and types.
Assigning teachers to classes
As an administrator, you can view and edit any assessment in Accelerus. For obvious reasons, that’s not advisable for a large school, so we’ll begin by adding your account as a class teacher so that you can see things from a teacher’s perspective.
From the ‘Management’ screen, select ‘manage data’.
Select ‘Classes’, and pick a class you’d like to become the teacher for. Here, I’ve selected science. You can either double-click it or click it once and then press ‘edit’.
Add your account as Teacher 2 (you can replace the existing teacher, but this might make the later templates look untidy).
You could also add a short description of the class that you’d like printed on the reports (this will be covered in later tutorials).
Important: You must now refresh your browser by pressing F5 or the refresh button, in order to get Accelerus to load you as a class teacher.
Viewing and editing assessment data
Go to ‘class’, and then ‘Assess classes’.
NOTE: As you’re an administrator, you also have access to the ‘school’ tab, where you will see all classes.
Teachers usually only see classes that they’ve been assigned to teach.
Remember, teacher allocations are handled automatically by our Wonde integration.
Click the class you’ve assigned to yourself. You will see the class description you previously entered, as well as a list of students in that class. Click ‘Grid view’ to see all student results.
The key parts of the gird view are shown below:
Changing mark schemes and adding assessment items
You may find that the default mark schemes do not suit your school. If this is it the case, you can easily change them.
Navigate to ‘Management’ –> School settings and tools
Scroll to ‘Marking schemes’, and select the ‘List’ schemes.
These are some of the most used schemes, as they allow you to select only valid responses.
By default, we’ve provided a 4-point scale, that goes from ‘excellent’ to ‘poor’ for homework and attitude. Let’s change this scale to different wordings by double clicking it
Double click any of the ‘Displayed value’ items to change what it’s called. You might, for example, change it to ‘Outstanding’ through to ‘Requires improvement’.
Return to class à Select a class à Grid view. You will see that all of the grade scales have updated to the new values.
This allows administrators to quickly and easily change grading scales without many manual changes.
Adding new assessment items
Accelerus makes it simple to create assessment items and quickly share or update them across subjects.
Notes: Each subject has its own set of assessment items. Each class inherits its assessment items from its parent subjects. Because of this, you may need to create a different subject for each year group in your school. For example, if art has different assessments in year 7 and year 8, you will need to create subjects called ArtY7 and ArtY8 to hold the different assessment items.
Most schools use a template for each year group or subject which has repeated assessment items.
Go to ‘Management’ –> Manage data
Select a template subject (you may wish to create different templates for each year or subject).
Then click ‘Assessments’ to edit the assessments for this subject.
Add a new assessment item by inserting its values in the last row of the table. You should include:
- A code: this will be displayed at the top of the assessment entry grid. It must be unique to each subject.
- A marking scheme: this is one of the schemes you set up earlier, and defines allowed inputs for the assessment item.
- Tags: These allow you to quickly filter assessment items.
- Description: This is shown in a longer explanation of the data when teachers input their data.
- Calculation: If this is a calculated field, you can input the calculation here.
We will now copy this assessment items to different subjects: Once all the data is input, select the item(s) you wish to copy (you can select more by holding down Ctrl / ⌘ and clicking multiple items).
Click ‘Copy’ to copy these to other subjects.
Select the subjects you wish to copy to. You can search for individual subjects using the search boxes at the top of the table. For example, to select all Y7 classes, enter ‘7’ in the Level box. Select all subjects by clicking the square marked with a green box, or select individual subjects by holding ctrl / ⌘.
Click ‘Copy to’ when you’re happy with your selection.
Define the behavior you want as the assessment items are copied. If you are updating an assessment item (perhaps by changing a marking scheme or a calculation), you can replace any existing assessment items with what you’ve just made.
Click Copy when you’re happy.
You will now find your added item in the assessment items for each of the selected subjects.
