To allow the various aspects of the DB Education Portal to work fully, you will need to map your assessment model into the system. This is a one off process that will carry forward year on year, meaning you will only need to make updates if you change your assessment model or add new subjects to your timetable model.
Overview
The DB Education Portal makes use of four key assessment aspects, assigned to each teaching group. Each school will utilise and label these in different ways, but we place the following nominal labels within the Administration Portal:
- Target Column - A target grade column, normally an FFT50 target grade. This is utilised as part of our staff facing progress measures and our Progress 8 calculations
- Student Facing Target - A target grade visible to students, often the same as the Target Column, but can be a more aspirational grade. This is visible to students and families within the Student Profile
- Projected Grade - A projected or current grade that the student is likely to achieve
- Behaviour Rating - A behaviour grade used to rate engagement or behaviour in a given lesson. This is often on a 1-3 or 1-5 rating scale, but can be customised for each school
The first time you utilise our system you will need to map each of the above, to each subject and year group in the school.
Step One - Load Administration Dashboard
Login to the DB Education Administration Panel using the link on your portal homepage. If you do not see this button, ask somebody who is a system administrator to enable your access to this page.
Once the Administration Dashboard loads fully, navigate to ‘Setup Assessment’ and then ‘Define Assessment Aspects’.
Step Two - Define your Assessment Aspects
On this page, you need to enable any assessment aspects that you make use of in your management information system. You will likely find there are thousands of options, so make use of the search box to search for key terms that you use in your assessment aspect naming schema, for example ‘Target’ and ‘Projected’, ticking those used.
Try to only enable those aspects that you use, as all assessment data linked to these will later be imported. Importing unnecessary aspects will slow down the system on numerous pages.
IMPORTANT: You must turn off any search, by deleting any text in the search box, before clicking submit. Failing to do this will only save the currently filtered aspects.
Step Three (Optional) - Run Synchronisation
After updating the aspects you wish to import, it is useful to manually run the assessment synchronisation script. To do this go to the ‘Data Synchronisation’ page and run script number four; ‘4. Synchronise Assessments’. This will automatically run over night if you skip this step.
This will import grades, matching the selected aspects, from the last thirty days. To import grades from the last six years, for example as part of the initial setup, change the "Setup Mode" Site Option to "True" on the Site Options page before running the script. Doing this will take at least an hour to synchronise. Remember to disable this setting again once the import is complete.
Step Four (Optional) - Setup Assessment Filters
Often, your school will make use of a sensible naming schema within their assessment aspects. As an example, all Year 7 target aspects may contain the phrase ‘KS3 Target’ or all Year 11 aspects may start with ‘1-9 Target’.
You will likely want to categorise these options, so that only the relevant aspects are included on each drop down when you reach Step Five. This can be achieved in the ‘Site Wide Options’ page. Once on this page, scroll to the bottom and make use of the following three settings for each year group:
If you have a number of different naming schemas, these can be entered as comma separated values. This will allow you to filter if you do not use an entirely consistent naming methodology.
Step Five - Map your Assessment Aspects
You are now ready to map each subject to the three relevant aspects. Go to ‘Setup Assessment’ and then ‘Map Aspects to Subjects’. This will load each subject that your school delivers, within each year group.
The system will try to automatically select the correct options, by making use of the filters that you setup in Step Four. In an ideal world, your assessment aspects will be named with your custom filter, followed by the subject name, for example: Challenge Target Grade – Maths.
If this is the case, you should not need to do much. If your naming methodology is less fixed you may need to select many of the values manually.
Finish your selection and then click Submit at the bottom of the page. This will overwrite any previously setup values so you will need to make sure that they are all correct.
Step Six (Optional) - Updating Mapping for Individual Groups
In rare instances, groups within the same subject and year group may utilise different assessment aspects. If this is the case you can update Individual groups using the ‘Map Aspects to Groups’ page.
This page will not overwrite all previous values in the way that Step Five does, instead just saving the drop down menus that you change.
Final Step - Relax
Our core synchronisation runs each night and will calculate a wide range of scores, including progress, progress 8, attainment scores and more. This can in some instances take until 5pm the following day to complete fully. Once complete, graphs on the SLT, Year and Department Dashboards will populate themselves fully.