I Should Be Marking

The more I look at Assessing Pupils’ Progress (APP), the more I like what has been done. The problem I have is that I need to devise some kind of recording and reporting mechanism, and this is proving a little tricky – so let me explain what I’ve got so far.

Based on this grid, it seems that most of the criteria can be split into 3 sections, and then into 3 sub-sections that are assessed as meeting Level 3, 4, 5 or 6. Levels 7 and 8 are a little more tricky, but are also rare (IME) and so I’m concentrating on 3 – 6 for now.

So I can give each student a Level for each of the relevant descriptors, and this will build up over the course of KS3 into a picture of exactly what the student has achieved, and when. But how?

The solution needs to be accessible to all ICT teaching staff, and if it produces a nice output to show students, then so much the better. We could do this in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet, but there would be over 700 worksheets (at 1 per pupil). We could try using a Pivot Table, but you’d still have a significant issue of scale. I think the solution needs to be a database.

I’m not an expert in databases. I can quite happily plow through GCSE and AS level problems, but in the real world it gets more difficult. I’ve knocked up an E-R diagram (below) that outlines my thoughts, but I don’t know how efficient or elegant that database structure really is.

In terms of platform, I could make an Access database, but then it wouldn’t be readily accessible. I don’t have the skills to implement a MySQL/PHP solution and the only online DBMS solutions I have found (e.g. Zoho) don’t work beyond a basic flat-file graphing and analysis tool.

So, thoughts and ideas welcome!

NB. Actually, I would probably split the Descriptor entity and have 1-many with a ‘category’ table (each category having 3 descriptors).