Setting the Qualitative Ranges for Analysis on Tapestry

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The Qualitative Ranges are for the overview graphs in the analysis section of Tapestry and control the colour coded sections - so what is trailing, satisfactory, and good (or whatever words you choose to use).

This setting contains 3 tabs for "Progress", "Attainment" and "Thoroughness". Each tab works in the same way, and it is here that you can set thresholds for each qualitative range i.e. what does trailing mean in numbers.

Progress: The difference in attainments for a child across 2 periods. 0 means that they are progressing at the same rate as they are aging. A negative number means they are progressing at a slower rate than they are aging or that they haven't progressed at all, but it doesn't necessarily mean they are going backwards (although it can). For example, if a child was at 30-50 secure in January, and still 30-50 secure in May, they would have aged 4 months, but their attainment will have stayed the same so it's possible their progress will now say -4 (but it will depend on their exact age and if those extra 4 months have pushed them out of the age related expectation band).

Attainment: The number of months above or below their actual age that a child has been assessed as (this is calculated from the snapshot value. So if a child has been assessed as 30-50 Secure, we would expect them to be between the ages of 43 months and 50 months. If their actual age was in this bracket then we would say their attainment was 0. If they were 41 months old, we would say their attainment was 2 (because they are 2 months away from being in the 43-50 band. If they were 51 months old, we would say their attainment was -1.

Thoroughness: The average number of assessments made in an aspect for a child throughout a period (so the total number of assessments divided by 17).

Click here for dedicated tutorial about what these three mean and how they're worked out.

 

 

You can rename the ranges in the left hand column - for example, if you don't like the word trailing and would rather use 'aim to increase'.

Set Default Ranges: sets all the thresholds in the tab back to "factory settings" i.e. no customisation.

Reset: sets all the thresholds back to the last saved state i.e. undoes any customisation performed in the current session.

- : removes the last threshold (in this case that would be 'Good').
+ : adds a new threshold to the bottom of the list. You can type in a title for it and set the minimum value that it starts from. This will adjust the maximum value in the previous threshold, and the last threshold always has a maximum value of infinity.

In reality, setting a very rigid threshold may produce overly pessimistic or optimistic results as the rate of development can speed up and slow down in individual children, so you may wish to assess 'satisfactory' development with a buffer either side of their actual age e.g. +/- 2 months, rather than 0 - 2 months which you can see in the screenshots for this tutorial. You can change these values at any point, so if after you've been using Tapestry for a few periods, the colours you're seeing in the overview bar charts don't seem to reflect how you know your children are doing and what the quantitative scores reflect, then it might be worth changing the values here until they're more realistic.

Make sure you press the Save button when you're happy with the values you've selected.