Tracking Grids
The Tracking Grids module in iSAMS is a custom module developed in house to provide quick and easy access to tracking data on our pupils. It will pull the latest baseline data and grades from School Reports as soon as they are entered by teachers.
Quick Video Introduction
Accessing the Module
in the main iSAMS module screen find the Tracking Grids module, if you like you can click the start next to the module to add it to you favourites.
Once in the module you will see a menu bar like the one below. Note that the module does require a large monitor to view correctly and some elements may be compressed or hidden on a smaller screen.
Choosing a report
The left hand side gives you access to the most used reports:
- Basedata - Allows you to view the latest basedata by year group
- Grades - Allows you to view the latest grades by year group, this compares grades against basedata and should be used regularly for progress tracking
- Effort - Shows effort for each year group from school reporting data
- Distributions (Experimental) - Shows some crude distributions of grades that can be grouped by various factors. Good for seeing at a glance the distribution of grades awarded per subject.
- Analysis (Experimental) - Will collate all grades and progress tracking into a per subject view. This will show per subject the average difference from predicted grades and the standard deviation of that difference. Great for checking if certain subjects are predicting low/high or have a co-hort that is under or over achieving across the subject. Can also group by teacher or form.
Modifying a report
The right hand side covers:
- Filters - filtering your data
- Group By - Change the "rows" that the reports are grouping by, this is normally one pupil per row but can be set to group by subject, year, form and more.
- Data - Filter the type of data that you want displayed in the report. Toggle attainment, effort, exam results, basedata etc...
- Colours and Formatting - Change the look and feel of the resulting report. Configure grade highlighting options, how basedata is presented.
Re-run the report with any updated settings, important to click after changing any of the above settings.
Finally the Excel button allows you to download the report in excel format so you can manipulate the data further or print it off. Note that although it does its best, excel will often mess up a lot of the formatting and may need some tweaking to look right once exported.
Viewing a report
The sample above shows a standard grades report. The grey rows at the top show: the subject, the academic year the data is from, the terms the data was collected and finally the type of data. See the bottom of this page for a list of grade abbreviations used in the tracking system.
Each row then shows the data requested for each group. Any baseline data that is applicable will be shown as a grey column at the start of each subject and should be filtered to only show a matching grade scale based on the school reporting data that has been gathered.
You can click on the header for any column to sort the data by that column, click again to sort in reverse order.