Refinement Help

[Elaine Brown]

Hello, I'm a childminder and I've recently started using Tapestry and think its fab.  Just want a bit of advice with regard to 'Refinements'.  If I do an observation on a child who is 'emerging' in an area and I add that as a refinement, when the child becomes 'secure' in that area how would I manage/change it?  Would I just go back into the observation and amend it when I am looking at my tracking, or would I need to do a new observation? I've not been adding refinements to my observations as I'm unsure the best way to manage it correctly.  If you could point me in the right direction or to a tutorial, that would be great, thanks.

[finleysmaid]

OK so just my thoughts (im no expert!) if you don't do refinements its a bit more tricky ive found to show progress as say the 30-50 months section is 20 months of development. So my feeling about your question is I would want to see another ob....it's unlikely that the child is going to go from emerging to secure in a skill/area of development in that short a time that another ob would not be needed. I always think the refinements are a bit like traffic light systems Emerging just starting to do developing getting better secure can do all the time with no help required and is consistent at it. We also tend to find we have quite a few obs showing the same thing under different circumstances ..again this shows the level that the child can achieve across their time with you.

[Elaine Brown]

That makes sense, thank you.

 

[OlayaTapestrySupport]

Hi Elaine,

Welcome to the forum!!

As finleysmaid very well answered (thank you finleysmaid!), in terms of the refinements that you use when you add an assessment within an observation, you might want to look at the overall picture. A child that has only started showing some behaviours within the 30-50 age band, for instance, would be considered to be 'emerging'. Which refinement you use will depend on what you have been able to observe, but also your knowledge of each child; at the end of the day you are the one working with them and have a wider view of the capabilities of the children in your setting. 

We have written an article on our 'best fit' approach when it comes to observing, this might be of help!

Observing and assessing extended tutorial for Tapestry users

As per the summative assessment scores, there is not a certain number of observations needed to move a child up from say emerging to developing, this will just depend on the average.

To explain how the average is calculated, each assessment that is made for that child, in a particular aspect, for a term, is assigned a number. The lowest assessment made will be assigned the number 1, then each age band/refinement between the lowest and highest number will be assigned a subsequent number. So let's say you have made four assessments for a child which are: 22-36 emerging, 30-50 emerging, 30-50 emerging, and 30-50 emerging. The assigned numbers would be as follows:

22-36E = 1

22-36D = 2

22-36S = 3

30-50E = 4

So, we have one assessment with the value of 1 (22-36E) and three assessments with the value of 4 (30-50E). To work out the average we would add up all of the assessment values, so 1+4+4+4 and divide this by the number of assessments, which is 4. This gives us a score of 3.25. We would then need to round the number to be whole, so this gives us a score of 3. We can then convert this back to an assessment value, and as shown above, 3 would equal 22-36 secure. Therefore this child's summative assessment, worked out as an average, would be 22-36 secure. 

We recommend that you review your children's summative assessment scores at the end of each assessment periods. The default scores will be those figures estimated by Tapestry based on the assessments you have added throughout the assessment period, but it might be that your professional experience and knowledge of the child differ from these results. If this were the case, you can manually override any of the summative assessment scores from the individual summative assessment screen. For this, you'd have to click on the age band and/or the refinement drop down menu for the corresponding child, aspect and period, and select the correct value. You can also add an assessment for any aspect that hasn't necessarily been observed as such in that period. Do remember to save the changes, though!

It is important that the values in the summative assessment are correct, as all of the other tracking screens (snapshots and analysis) will feed from these scores, so do come back to these at the end of each period.

I hope this was helpful  

Best wishes,

Olaya

[Elaine Brown]

Thank you!

[OlayaTapestrySupport]

You're very welcome Elaine!!

If you have any further doubts, do not hesitate to contact us on customer.service@eyfs.info