How do I see how much progress an individual child is making?

[Lauren]

Please note that this tutorial is about tracking for the old EYFS. For information about tracking screens for the new EYFS 2021, please click here.

 

There are several different ways in which you can view progress for individual children on Tapestry.

The first way is by showing you the child's assessment scores for several periods side by side. This is the more visual representation of progress and doesn't take the child's actual age into account - it just shows how they have moved through the age bands and refinements. There are two different screens on Tapestry which will show you progress in this way.

Another way is through the points progress screen, which will give you a score of how many ‘jumps’ of progress a child has made, so how many age bands and/or refinements they have moved between, between two set terms

Finally, we offer a screen which works out a numerical value based on a comparison of how many months their actual age is away from their assessed age between periods. This way doesn't show you which age band and refinement they have been placed in, so won't be affected by whether they are on track attainment wise or not. It does take the number of months that have passed into account so essentially what this figure shows is whether or not the child's attainment is increasing at the same rate as they are aging. 

You can navigate to a specific section of this tutorial using the links below.

1. Age Band Tracker
2. Comparison Individual
3. Points Progress screen
4. Progress Picker Screen

Let's start by looking at the first one I mentioned - screens where you can see progress in terms of how the children are moving through the age bands.

 

Age Band Tracker

 

The Age Band Tracker is a screen within snapshots. You can find it by going to the Tracking tab (1), ensure you are on the EYFS section (2), and click on the 'Group view' button (3)  in the Age Band Tracker box. 

 

 

This will take you to a page with a chart like the one shown below for each aspect of the EYFS.

 

On there you will see that each column refers to a period and each row refers to a specific age band and refinement. You should see each of your children's names in the columns of every period they've been assessed in and in line with the age band and refinement that they were assessed as. For example, in the chart above you can see that Christopher Muffin was assessed as 8-20 Secure in Autumn Term 2015/16.

 

In order to see the progress a particular child has made, you just need to hover over their name. Please note that this isn't possible if you're using a touchscreen device.

 

Once you have done that, the other names will fade out so just the child you are hovering over is highlighted. See below.

 

 

 

You can see that in my example, Christopher has improved by one refinement per period for the first three periods, then he has improved by an entire age band between Summer 2015/16 and Autumn 2016/17, then he has gone back again by the Spring term. The data here is taken from the summative assessment snapshots, so because that big jump for Autumn 2016/17 seems unusual, I would go back there to find out which observations were averaged to get the 30-50 emerging score.

 

Comparison Individual

 

To get to the next screen you need to go back to the Tracking tab, EYFS section, and click on the 'Comparison: Individual' button. 

 

 

This will take you to a screen where you can select the period or periods you would like to see and the child or children you would like to see them for.

As you are looking to see progress made for an individual child, please select that child by clicking on the + Add Child button. You will also need to select up to four periods. You can do that by clicking on the + Add Snapshot button and either clicking on one, then pressing okay, then pressing + Add Snapshot again, etc, or you can press and hold 'Ctrl' on your keyboard and select the four periods you wish to see.

 

 

That will bring up a bar chart where each bar represents the child's attainment for that period. Below that chart, there will be a spreadsheet style list with a written version of the child's attainment and number of contributing obs in each aspect. There will be one of these lists per period.

 

The coloured bar chart is a simple and easy to understand way of seeing progress - if the bars are increasing in height with each period then the child is improving, if they are staying the same, no progress has been made, and if the bars are getting shorter, the child is going backward.

Please make sure that your periods are being displayed in chronological order though, otherwise this could lead to some confusion!

 

That's it for seeing an individual child's progress in terms of a seeing attainments side by side. The screens we have looked at can be used to see things other than the progress of an individual child, but I won't look at that here.

 

Now let's move on to the Points Progress screen.

 

Points Progress screen

 

You’ll find this screen by clicking on the ‘Points Progress’ button in the Progress box in the EYFS analysis section from the ‘Tracking’ tab.

 

 

Here you can select two terms to compare and Tapestry will calculate a ‘points progress score’ based on how many the number of age bands and/or refinements the child has moved between in those two terms. So, a points progress score of +1, means a child has moved up one refinement within an age band, or has moved from secure in one age band to emerging in the next. For example, if a child moved from 22-36 emerging, to 22-36 developing, this would be a score of +1.

 

 

If you click on a child’s name you will be able to see the age band/s and refinements they have moved between in these terms.

 

 

 

If you'd like a more in-depth explanation of this screen you can read our tutorial about it. 

 

Progress Picker Screen

 

The best place to see progress as a single number relating to how much time has passed is the 'Progress Picker Screen'. You can find the button for this from the Tracking tab in the EYFS section. 

 

 

 

That will take you to a page where you need to select the two periods you would like to see the progress between, and a group of children that you know the individual child you're looking for is a part of. You can choose 'All Children' if you like, but if you have a particularly big account, you might want to narrow that down so you don't need to scroll to get to the individual child.

 

 

That will open a chart like the one below. For each child, in each aspect you will either see a single number or a dash.

 

 

The dashes mean that there isn't an assessment for the child in that aspect in at least one of the 2 periods you have selected.

 

The numbers indicate how many months a child's attainment has increased, relative to how many months have passed. As such if you see a zero, that means a child's attainment has gone up at the same rate as they have aged. If they have a minus number, that doesn't necessarily mean they have gone backwards - it's possible that they just haven't progressed as quickly as they've aged. In any case, age related expectations are not taken into account.

 

Please take a look at this tutorial to see exactly how progress scores are calculated - to understand progress you really need to understand attainment first, so it's worth reading our tutorial about attainment too.

 

So that's it - those are the main screens to look at when you're trying to see the progress for individual children. There are other screens for looking at attainment, thoroughness, and group progress, but I won't go into those here.

If you have any follow up questions about individual progress please send in a support ticket to customer.service@eyfs.info where we can answer your questions via email, or set up an over the phone training session where we can look at your data with you and help explain anything you're unsure of.

 

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