Tracking Junior Data

Not related to eLearning, however I've had Jake (our achievement data guru) come to me with a proposal to start measuring our year 9 and 10 achievement against curriculum levels rather than the Not Achieved, Achieved, Merit, Excellence scale. I'm all for it. Currently we've developed a Junior Certificate which requires a grade from 1-6 to be awarded for each of the key competencies. From this we have generated an average score. The average is then being used to predict (based on previous year's results) how the students will achieve at level 1. The students receive feedback on what their score is, and feed forward about what they need to do to improve their average. It's deliberately unrelated to academic achievement in order to prevent students classifying themselves as underachievers and it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.  However Jake thinks the Junior Certificate needs to be more directly related to achievement than it is currently.  I’m getting him to go to the Head of Department meeting on Monday to ask their opinion on this.  If it looks like too much work for all to undertake we’ll trial it with the departments that are happy to do it, and after reflection next year reassess whether it should be adopted for all departments.  As a first step the teachers are going to be asked to assess which curriculum level they believe the student is at.  We’ll look at this data to see if there is a correlation between that and the average grade from the Junior Certificate and work from there.