TM4T Using Your System 3.4.3 - Technology: Student Reports

[Note: as at Oct 2013, we are re-cutting all technology videos so they are reasonably up to date. This means no YouTube videos for the time being. Sorry ]

Student reports seem to be a contentious subject in many schools (we are talking here about a report in words, rather than any quantitative measures like grades or exam scores).

Teachers also seem to be divided regarding the merits of standardisation and automation.

Clearly if your school or your department has rules about individualised reports tailored to the students circumstances and parental inclinations, then you must respect that. Otherwise, you should seek to produce them in a time-efficient way, and this invariably involves technology; typically either a mail-merge or form letter approach, or using a word-bank of some kind.

Here is a summary of the Problem

Schools vary in the frequency, length and type of reports they produce, but a typical secondary school will send parents and guardians a written report on their little angels' progress at least once a year and at most once a term. These reports are typically comprise one paragraph updates from each subject teacher (around 50 words) with briefer comments from pastoral staff and school management.

In order to spread the load, most schools scatter different year groups' reports through the calendar. This means a subject teacher will be producing reports on average every six weeks, with the workload determined by how-many-classes a teacher takes in each year-group in each week. Core subjects may teach the same class two or even three times a week, whereas non-Core teachers may see the same class only once a week, but will consequently have twice as many reports to write.

A non-core teacher teaching two groups in each year group in KS3-4, will therefore have ten sets of reports to write each year.

The maths are pretty obvious: if a teacher takes five minutes to write a paragraph for each student, this represents two and a half-hours work per class - or five hours extra work every six weeks for a non-Core teacher.

Five minutes per report may seem like a long time, but this straightforward task is complicated by a number of factors: quality expectations are high (no spelling or grammatical mistakes allowed); there is often a word-count restriction (which demands terse but courteous wording) both parents and school management discourage over-formulaic reports, while underperforming students with behavioural issues may require a considerable degree of tact and creativity to describe.

The techniques mentioned above (mail-merge or form-letter) can be useful, but attract legitimate criticism if they are used lazily. Here is an example of a lazy report.

George has not done well this termGeorge's classwork is not satisfactory. George's homework is not satisfatory, George's attendance is not goodGeorge's effort is satisfactory. George's attitude is satisfactory. Needs to work harder.

[The errors in layout, grammar, and punctuation are deliberate on this web-page, but are usually inadvertent in practice]

The first point to note is that regardless of how efficiently we standardise and automate the production of reports - and that is what I am going to recommend - this will apply at most to only 90% of students. There will always be a need for bespoke reports tailored to individual student circumstances and sending a clear message - for example the lazy report above could read:

This has been a difficult year for George, which has affected his motivation and his achievement. George needs to focus on the future; if he works hard he WILL catch up and has the potential to do really well.

This 80-20 approach - doing 80% of the work quickly in order to allow plenty of time to tackle the difficult items - is fundamental in TM4T.

Here is a high-level approach to producing school reports (we will break these steps into smaller steps later).

a) figure out the rules and roughly what you are going to write

b) change it so it can be automated

c) enter data into a spreadsheet

d) mail-merge the data into one document

e) copy and paste each report into your school database.

Here are the steps in detail, which will still need to be tailored to your school policies and tools (the software used to produce parents' reports):

Step 1 Analysis

This is the step most often omitted by inexperienced teachers, and it is the omission which results in unacceptable reports. The first part of your analysis should address school policies and standards. We will be using this rather picky and petty example of school standards to produce our reports (Note that the later steps will be illustrated in videos ***).

School Reports Policy

Student reports should not exceed 400 characters. The report must start with a positive comment, and end with a positive comment unless the report itself is overwhelmingly positive. The report must be specific regarding any issues with a student's behaviour, attitude or effort, and explicit regarding a student's homework record. Term reports should summarise the topics covered during the term. All reports should predict a student's eventual achievement, but should not quote this term's marks or grades - these will be reported separately.

At the risk of stating the obvious: if teachers did not read the policy above, they risk having possibly hundreds of reports being rejected by their management team, and wasting days of their young lives.

The second stage of the analysis is simply asking yourself 'what does the parent or guardian want to know'. The best way of achieving this is to imagine and jot down actual questions which a parent might ask. Don't do this mentally - actually write them down. This step helps you to write in an active conversational tone. A parent might ask 'How is Alex doing?'; not 'Summarise the progress the student has made'.

Here is an example of what you might jot down:

• How is Alex doing?

• Any issues we need to know about?

• What stuff is she studying this term?

• What is she like in class?

• What grades will she get

• What does she need to concentrate on or improve?

[Note: this example assumes that this is a subject teacher's report in a secondary school. Obviously pastoral report, or other types of reports, may have different standards and different parental questions]

Step 2 Prototype

Based on an understanding of what you need to write, type a report for a typical student. 'Typical' does not necessarily mean average: if most of your students are good, do a good report. When you are looking at 'what you need to write', you need to bring together school policy and common sense. Here is an example:

Alex is doing well this year. Her behaviour, effort and attitude are all good. This term she has been studying Dickens and Victorian literature. She is doing well in class and her homework record is also good. Based on current progress, she is likely to achieve or exceed her target grade. Next term, Alex needs to concentrate on varying her writing style more.

Then, sanity check the prototype:

- less than 400 characters? Yes, but not much scope for any more words.

- positive enough? Yes, but not for every student.

- behaviour, effort, attitude, homework, classwork, and grades all mentioned? Yes again.

- does it answer the parental questions? Yes, except for the 'any issues' question, which needs to be tackled separately.

Now, look at the structure of what you have written, and what you will need to write. Use your prototype text, supplemented by any optional or omitted requirements. Here is an example:

1. Possibly need a positive opening if the student isn't doing well.

2. Alex is doing well this year.

3. Her behaviour, effort and attitude are all good.

4. Possibly mention any issues which need mentioning

5. This term she has been studying Dickens and Victorian literature.

6. She is doing well in class and her homework record is also good

7. Based on current progress, she is likely to achieve or exceed her target grade

8. Next term, Alex needs to concentrate on varying her writing style more

9. Possibly need an upbeat ending if the student isn't doing well.

It should be clear that there is problem here with word length, but we will tackle that later. The important thing is that you must be aware of these problems right at the start - otherwise you may waste a of effort. 

Step 3 Standardise

Next, reword your prototype to make it into a flexible form of words is. 'Flexible' means that you should be able to change it easily to cater for a less successful, and a more successful student. Break it down into its component parts.

In order to do this, you will need to understand the basic techniques you have at your disposal. The central technique is called mail merge or form-letter which involves creating a spreadsheet similar to this simple example (in practice, this would have as many rows as the class has pupils).

You would then write a standard report, which would look like this...

<Forename> has had <Rating> year in Business Studies.

A couple of clicks will then produce thirty mini-reports along the lines of...

Amy has had a good year in Business Studies

Brian has had a satisfactory year in Business Studies

Cindy has had an outstanding year in Business Studies

etc

In this example, the words 'has had a year in Business Studies' are known as standard and the words 'forename' and 'rating' are known as variable. You may have spotted that even this simple example involved some careful choice of what variable words to use, and to avoid ungrammatical constructions like 'a outstanding year'.

There are four other common techniques which are used. The most obvious of these is copy-and-paste with find-and-replace, which is very basic, helpful but prone to over use. If for example, there are two or more students who are almost indistinguishable in every respect, you can simply copy one report, and paste it again to create a second copy. For example, if you copy Alex's report...

Alex is doing well this year. Her behaviour, effort and attitude are all good. This term she has been studying Dickens and Victorian literature. She is doing well in class and her homework record is also good. Based on current progress, she is likely to achieve or exceed her target grade. Next term, Alex needs to concentrate on varying her writing style more.

… then you can use find-and-replace to change 'Alex' to 'Brian'. This can work, but there are dangers. Of course, you need to change 'her' to 'his' and 'she' to 'he', and many history teachers will have seen a report with 'hertory' mentioned.

The final three techniques are associated with spreadsheets and tend to be confused with each other. These are auto-complete, auto-fill and auto-correct.

Auto-complete (or word completion) is almost certainly familiar to you; this feature means that after you have keyed in an entry once into a column, ('satisfactory' in the example below), the program will automatically 'guess' what you are going to enter, based on your partial keying; in the example below, the word 'satisfactory' can be entered by keying 'a s' followed by the enter key.

You should be influenced by this feature when choosing your variable words: if you intend to describe some students' behaviour as 'very good' and others as 'very bad', the program cannot auto-complete until you have keyed in 'very g' or 'very b'; if you substitute 'excellent' or 'extremely disappointing', the program will auto-complete after 'exc' or 'ext'; if you choose 'brilliant' or 'appalling', you need only key 'b' or 'a'.

Most spreadsheet programs have column auto-complete automatically enabled. If this feature does not behave as described below, your technical support staff should be able to explain how to quickly enable it (how-to-do-it will vary depending on the software and version installed on your PC).

The second familiar time-saver is auto-fill, which is also enable on all common spreadsheet software.

This feature enables you to click in a cell and drag down the fill-handle (typically a black square) in the bottom right-hand corner. If the cell holds text, the contents will be copied to the cells below, unless the text is part of a predefined sequence.

This feature is particularly useful when a class where the vast majority have a similar assessment. For example, if 25 of your class are satisfactory regarding homework, you can auto-fill all 30 cells with 'satisfactory' and overtype (and auto-complete) the exceptions.

The third, less commonly used tool is auto-correct. This is very familiar in word-processing, automatically correcting typos like 'teh' to 'the', and spelling errors like 'accomodation' to 'accommodation'. For report-writing in business, however, it is frequently used in a more inventive way. If you have phrases which occur often - let's use 'if she maintains her current level of progress' as an example, you can change your auto-correct options (usually in the Tools-Options menu) to set this to auto-correct some made-up word - for example 'ism' - as shown below. Of course, this is unnecessary if the same phrase is used for every student - it can be included in the standard text. However, if some students need 'unless she improves her current level of progress' (auto-corrected from 'usi'), these phrases can be entered very quickly.

There is one, fourth and final time-saver in use, but I would not recommend it unless you have a technical (ideally IT) background. This is the IF statement. The exact layout of an IF statement will varies slightly depending on your software, but it usually looks something like this:

(click to enlarge)

It is also fairly easy to make multiple-choice (known as nested) IF statements, but it is very easy to get lost in a maze of brackets and semi-colons. if you don't know how to use nested IF statements from previous experience, it is probably not worth learning to use them just for report writing.

IF statements can be very useful, especially in examples like this:

= IF (A2<60;'Extra revision is needed';'')

The end of this statement may look like random punctuation, but it does make sense.

This kind of statement would be used to add 'optional' text to a report, depending - for example on a test result. This feature is useful in situations where some students require an optional comment, and can be used to review a marker column - this is shown in the video here (***)

A couple of other key techniques are sometimes necessary, and these are also demonstrated on the videos section of the website:

Splitting names into surname and forename:

becomes