E-assessment

Online rules of engagement

Words Julie Nightingale

Technology

As school reports become more accessible, we look at whether this will help parents feel more involved in assessment initiatives

From September 2010, secondary schools will be expected to report online to parents and carers about their child's progress. Primary schools will follow by September 2011.

The thinking behind the move is that engaging parents in their child's learning and school life is a key tactic to raise standards, with the idea that learning at home with a parent or other significant adult can enthuse children about learning.

Research by Becta, the former education technology agency, suggested that parents are keen to have this greater â?~engagement'. Some 82 per cent of parents surveyed said they wanted schools to keep them better informed of their child's progress at school. And separate research from the CIEA shows that parents view assessment as a key factor in deciding on schools for their children (see News page 9).

Yet some schools are struggling against parental apathy when trying to involve them in the learning process. One such is Djanogly City Academy in Nottingham. Although it is highly rated, over-subscribed, and has a raft of ICT accolades under its belt, the school has found engaging parents a challenge.

In June, the school is introducing a new element to its existing technology infrastructure - Serco's CMIS database and ePortal online gateway - which it hopes will draw more parents into finding out about their children's learning and how they can help.

A new interface to the school's information management system and VLE (virtual learning environment) will allow parents to see all of their child's assessment data - test scores, targets, projected grades, plus attendance rates and other information - at a glance via a single log-on.

"The hope is that it will encourage more parents to use the system because parental engagement is one of our key challenges," says Matt Buxton, leader of curriculum and learning technologies at Djanogly.

"We have been involved in a number of schemes to get devices and connectivity into homes and now we are quite confident that a large majority of families will be able to access this system."

As well as the details of scores and targets, the new interface retains the traffic light system that the school uses to give a quick-check guide to a student's progress. If a student is hitting targets in a subject, a green light will appear on-screen beside it but it will be amber or red if they are under-performing.

"When a parent comes in for the academic review day they are given a print-out from the system of their child's targets and other information with the â?~traffic lights' on it. It gives them an immediate snapshot of how their child is doing - so if they look at science and there's a red light, they can say, right, let's make a beeline for the science teacher, " says Buxton. â?oWhile the traffic light system is a key visual element and useful for everyone, it helps with parents for whom English is a second language in particular," he says.

Neale-Wade Community College, a large comprehensive in Cambridgeshire, is already providing parents with swift and up-to-date data on their children using STARS 4 Schools assessment software. STARS records assessment data, produces reports for parents, viewable online (with password), and also generates school-wide statistics. The school helped to develop the package with information management specialists Hyperspheric Solutions.

â?oWe didn't want to produce reports just once a year. We wanted to have current grades or levels in real time so that parents can check them at any time," says Paula Brenchley, assistant principal.

â?oFor example, as a DT teacher, every time I mark coursework and press â?~save', that mark is automatically made available to the students and parents, so it is constant feedback. Reports have a finality, whereas this is Assessment for Learning."

Eggbuckland Community College, an
11-18 school in Plymouth, has just switched to using Capita's SIMS information management system, and its Assessment Manager software, which allows staff to drill down into data on individual groups and classes and zoom out to a school-wide view.

As with STARS, it means they can identify not only how individual children and classes are performing but also, for example, how children entitled to free school meals or who are in the gifted and talented groups are faring. It enables the staff to spot where extra tuition or other support is required and to track the results of that intervention.

Assessments are carried out by teachers every six weeks, and the results are shared with the students. The next step will be to make it available to parents online via the school's VLE. â?oIt's important that parental access is done by VLE and not any other system, because pupils use the VLE," says Matt Burrell, e-college manager. â?oSo when parents log on they need to see the same information - attendance, behaviour and achievement levels - as the student."

The hope is that if they are both seeing the same information it will make conversations at home about school more natural and draw parents more closely into the child's learning.

One of the Government's stipulations for online reporting is that the focus should be on arrangements that are â?omeaningful for parents, focusing on the quality of information rather than the quantity."

The issue of how to package data for parents is one that Incerts, a not-for-profit body specialising in development and research in assessment, has studied closely.

@When people talk about online reporting to parents, they are thinking about what is in school at the moment," says Chris Padden, Incerts' chief executive. @For example, teachers use sub-levels in assessing and there's an awful lot of talk about delivering that to the parents. I don't think many parents are interested in sub-level tracking of their children. They want to know what their children can and can't do."

The way forward, he suggests, is to interpret the information in a parent-friendly way but also give parents an idea of the next steps the child will be taking - and how they could help support that at home. For example, if the next stage of the Assessing Pupils' Progress (APP) framework is for the child to form neat legible handwriting, an activity for the parent could be suggested, such as sending out a letter to Santa to do with their child at home.

"Month-on-month, this will be interesting as a child progresses," says Padden. â?oIt doesn't overlap with what teachers are doing in class. It's real and also challenging."

It is good to hear that technology and the thinking about its usage are developing rapidly, but some teachers have raised the concern that the drive for more information for parents - as exemplified by the move to compulsory online reporting - will become an end in itself, and that the information generated will be a meaningless jumble.

Clearly, some of the technologies outlined above are addressing the issue of â?~information overload' by enabling schools to sift the data appropriately. But for schools yet to get to grips with what technology can do, there is a worry, agrees Martin Walker, a fellow of the CIEA and English assessment specialist.

"One of the problems teachers are starting to find is that there is no overall structure in place in their school but they are still being asked to report every few weeks. What you can get under pressure is off-the-cuff remarks, which might not be what you would say on reflection. The other danger is that remarks might be inconsistent from one month to the next, so there's no coherence.

"People in schools that use tracking software who have the right expertise, and where people have been trained properly will be fine, because technology does make life easier. But for those being pushed into doing more reporting too quickly, without a formal structure in place and proper training, there's a danger the whole thing will be disjointed."

It will make conversation at home about school more natural and draw parents more closely into the child's learning

Check list for online reporting

• How will online reporting fit with your school's existing assessment processes?
• How will you make sure that it generates information that is useful to teachingand learning?

• Do you/other staff understand why you are being asked to report to parents?What extra training will you/other staff need?
• Talk to your IMS (information management systems) and VLE (virtual learning environment) providers about what they can provide to enhance assessment processes. There may be issues around interoperability; whether the systems that hold different elements of information for parents can talk to each other.
• Think about the 'digital divide': how will parents/carers without home internet access be able to view their children's reports online? Can you provide access to computers after school? Can you take advantage of the Government's Home Access scheme?