I’ve already talked a bit about pulling the best assessment record, but I haven’t really talked about how I’m defining Assessment records in the OSIMS database. Here’s that discussion:
At their most basic level, assessments measure students’ abilities in one or more skills. Most often those abilities are reported as numerical values for each skill. In [...]
During the course of a school year, it may be necessary to assess students multiple times. This information can be very useful for monitoring the progress of students, but it also causes problems when you simply want to know the best scores that a group of students have posted. Getting the best record for an [...]
When working with educational data, the student is going to be the center of nearly every database query. From there we might attach test records, classes or involvement in programs. Often times programmers accomplish this with what is known as a “full inner join”. A method by which relevant records from both database tables are [...]
When designing the student data I made the unusual choice not to include the student’s gender in the student table. While the information may be useful for identifying students it really only narrows the field by roughly 50% and I think there are more useful ways to track the information.
Aggregating / Disaggregating Student Assessment Data
When [...]
I’m building OSIMS as a series of Xaraya modules enhanced with ExtJS. Xaraya does a great job at returning whole webpages of information, but that may be more than I need in many cases.
How Xaraya Builds Pages
Web page requests come in through the Xaraya core and are routed to the appropriate module and function. They [...]
The key to any student based information has to be the students. They are, afterall, the reason we’re building the system. In this assessment system we’ll be tying all sorts of data to these students. They’ll be enrolling in schools and classes, participating in educational programs, taking assessments and accumulating requirements toward graduation and certification. [...]
I’m using Xaraya as the php backend for this project. It’s a very robust platform to build upon with a number of great features for dealing with access control, templating and customization.
It was, unfortunately, built in the time before “AJAX” when javascript use was far more rudimentary and mostly for cosmetic purposes. After a fairly [...]
At a wedding last summer I was seated next to a gentleman who sells motorcycles for a living. He asked me about computer programming, “It’s all ones and zeroes, and a lot of math isn’t it?” It was an interesting question because, yes, ultimately everything in the computer is just ones and zeroes, but programmers [...]
Education is a very interesting environment in which to design software. There are many moving pieces of information. Students move into and out of the system, they progress through multiple classrooms and through many different teachers. Software designed for educators to track data on students must take this into consideration.
Desktop software can be a very [...]
What is OSIMS all about?
Several years ago I was hired by the North Clackamas School District in Oregon to help facilitate their assessment tracking efforts. What I didn’t realize then was that I was to be an integral part of a very progressive approach to student assessment in the State of Oregon. While [...]