Graphical Analysis of the Thoroughness Table

[Sarah_Dryden]

I have just taken a look at my children and the thoroughness of observations for the Autumn1 period. At the bottom of the screen there is an option to take a look at a chart depicting this information but I cannot work out what it is actually telling me as there is no key and every time I think I have come up with the answer, when working it back with the tabulated data, find it doesn't seem to make sense.

 

It is made up of shaded circles of varying darkness covering numbers of observations up the side and the aspect of learning across the bottom.

 

Can anyone explain what this chart means?

 

Many thanks.

[FSFRebecca]

Hi Sarah,

The screen you are looking at shows you the thoroughness coverage of the different groups in your setting across the different areas.

A group is 'boys' 'girls' 'EAL' for example - plus any other groups you have set as particular to you e.g a class or key person group. What that chart is telling you is that some groups are more/ or less thorough than others. We agree that it's very confusing and we are in the process of overhauling all the analysis screens to make them more understandable and much more user friendly.

If you are looking at thoroughness I can give you a few pointers which might be helpful?

Firstly - Thoroughness refers to the number of assessments carried out, not the number of observations - We are working on being able to show you both. At the moment it is possible to score very highly on thoroughness if you have assessed in every area - but that might have come from one observation - which, to my mind, isn't very thorough.

The most useful screen I think is this one:

Analysis > EYFS > Thoroughness > scroll to the bottom > Group picker screen > select assessment period

This will show you all the assessments carried out for a particular assessment period - bearing in mind that the assessments might have come from very few observations it is easy to see from that screen aspects where a child has not been assessed during that particular period.

Similarly, if you choose to look at the staff view you can see which areas of the EYFS staff are assessing in - which might be useful if one member of staff was concentrating too much in one area

Our plan, in the new analysis (after Christmas) is to show you coverage in terms of assessment (as now) to enable you to check that children are being regularly assessed across the EYFS but also to tell you how many observations have been carried out for each child (which might be useful as part of staff supervisions or appraisals - at the moment you can see how many observations a child has from their child page.

If I haven't answered your question let me know - or if you have other ideas for what you want 'Thoroughness' to do let me know that too!