With so many students in a school district, it can be challenging for administrators to keep up with grading practices and potential failures on an individual basis. Waiting until the end of the semester to spot struggling students often means it’s too late to help them out. Getting in early with at-risk students during the semester is key to let teachers tackle any learning or behavioral issues to address potential challenges before they become more serious. Early intervention can also help identify signs of stress, financial hardship, or social isolation. It allows you to connect students with the right support system to succeed long-term.
Tracking students' grades and attendance starting in 9th grade can help schools identify students who might be at-risk of dropping out. By the sixth grade, chronic absenteeism is one of three warning signs affecting a student's chances of graduating from high school, which also affects overall performance and grades.
With endless spreadsheets and no centralized data visualization of the student's grades, staying on top of tasks and identifying at-risk students can be time-consuming. With Standard Education, you can see which students are at risk in real-time with our Grading and Attendance dashboards. But once you have the data, how can you establish working habits to make sure you stay on top of it?
Tracking grading trends over time
You need to visualize the data to identify challenges and make informed decisions for your school district. If you rely on manual data processing, it may take too long and become less of a priority, leaving your staff without updated data for decision-making.
By analyzing these trends with a real-time dashboard, you can create personalized learning plans, try new grading practices, start tutoring programs, or other initiatives to help at-risk students engage and succeed in the classroom. Here are three strategies to incorporate data checkpoints into your workflow and turn your grading data into actionable insights.
3 strategies for using your grading data
- Establish Regular Data Check-In Points
Don't wait for mid-term or end-of-semester reports. Schedule consistent, brief reviews of real-time data throughout the week.
- Actionable Insight: Monitor individual student performance for any sudden declines or consistently low scores. Our analytics software highlights at-risk students by class, allowing you to view a comprehensive overview of their grades across all subjects through the student dashboard.
- Example: Set a goal to check the data every Monday and Wednesday morning. If you notice a student has multiple failing assignments in one week, reach out to the teacher for more information or bring a report to your next staff meeting.
- Focus on "Flag" Indicators and Trend Analysis
Leverage our tool's built-in "flag" indicators for failing students.
- Actionable Insight: Analyze trends to identify patterns. Is the issue confined to a specific individual, or are there grade-wide patterns associated with a particular teacher or subject?
- Example: Create a report to identify students with a 10% decrease in their overall grade average over the past two weeks. This will help pinpoint students who are beginning to struggle so you can move forward with early intervention.
- Facilitate Collaborative Data Meetings
Don't keep the data to yourself! Student data should not live in a silo. Schedule regular meetings with teachers and counselors to review student performance and discuss early intervention strategies.
- Actionable Insight: Encourage teachers to share their insights on student challenges and brainstorm targeted interventions. Use grading data to guide discussions and ensure that interventions are aligned with student needs.
- Example: Hold bi-weekly meetings for teachers to share observations. Also, provide grading dashboards for each class and teacher to identify patterns and address issues early.
How can Standard Education help visualize your grading data
At Standard Education, we don't want you to feel like you're always playing catch-up with your student data. That's why we offer nightly uploads of student information and real-time dashboards to help you visualize your data in a way that meets your needs. This enables you to make informed decisions and better support your students' success. Our interactive dashboards allow you to explore the most frequently failed classes across different subjects and grade levels.
Our dashboards provide a comprehensive classroom view at a teacher level, highlighting individual student risks and attendance issues. Teachers can also easily monitor their classes and compare performance against other classrooms in the school.
The dashboard filters also empower schools to conduct audits for one cohort at a time and anticipate future cohorts. One customer reduced the number of dropouts this year by 43%, which represents about 200 additional students that graduated this year, thanks to the data visualized in the Cohort Tracker. Book a demo today with Standard Education to see how we can help implement initiatives that make a difference.