Baseline

[Gill_Oliver]

Hi All, 

Just a quick query over baselines, we have been using tapestry for a year now and love it. Many of our children start with us when they are 2 and we do baseline assessments in the prime areas but obviously we do cross into specific areas throughout the term. Many of these children are staying with us and moving into the pre-school room this September. What do other settings do when children transition into the next age group (which is ongoing in our setting all year)  I am reluctant to re-do baselines if I lose their original baselines as many have sen and I want to be able to show the progress made since they started. What do other settings do in this situation because some of these children transitioning may not have assessments in some of the specific areas of learning from last term? 

Gill x

[FSFRebecca]

Hello Gill!

You could make an observation called 'Starting preschool' and note the term (Autumn 1 2018) and then when you do your cohort tracking always include it in your comparision screen? I'm writing a peice on using the comparison screen at the moment - it will be ready this week. Basically, when you choose your terms to compare choose Baseline, then Autumn 1 2018 and then the subsequent terms - then you will see how they are progressing.

Hope that helps 

[Gill_Oliver]

Thanks Rebecca, we only have 3 terms rather than Autumn 1, Autumn 2 etc so not sure this would work for us   Maybe we will just have to treat our Autumn term tracking as where they were when they joined pre-school. When I think back to paper tracking we never did a new baseline we just went from tracking 3 areas to 7. If children only moved rooms in September as they do in schools it would be easy as I could just add an Autumn 1 but they transition constantly. 

Gill 

[Lauren]

Hi Gill,

That's a tricky one! I think ultimately the best thing would be for you to be able to add multiple baselines. That is something on our 'new feature' to do list, but unfortunately we're not sure when that will be ready yet. 

In the meantime you have a couple of options:
1) Rather than using autumn as the baseline, you could override the scores in the last period of the year before (summer). Obviously that would mean you then lose the data from that if it is different to your baseline though, so also might not be ideal if you're looking at progress jumps over several years. 
2) Override the baseline, but export the original one as a PDF before you do so. You wouldn't then be able to do tracking using it on Tapestry, but you could still refer back to it. 

Would you like me to let you know when it is possible to add multiple baselines though?

Best wishes,
Lauren