Skill Assessments

Skill Assessments

Skill Assessments are grades representing a mastery level which you can give to students for specific accomplishments outside of regular assignments.  HomeSchool Minder comes with a Default Skill Assessment Scale defining three assessments (Strong, Acceptable and Weak) that can be used to indicate a student's ability in a particular area.

Adding a New Scale

If you wish, you can create your own scale to suit your particular needs.  To create a new Skill Assessment Scale, click on the Add button in the Skill Assessment Scales header.  An entry form will appear.

Enter a name for the scale (for example, “Self-directed”).  If you would like the new scale to become the default Skill Assessment Scale, click on the Default checkbox (in the example above, the scale is only going to be used for certain kinds of assessments, and so we do not want it to be the default).  Click Save to add the new scale.

Now add assessments to your new scale.  Click on the Add button in the row for your new scale.  An entry form will appear.

 

Enter the assessment or grade and select a Mastery level from the drop-down menu.  Grades that are categorized as indicating either a strong or weak mastery of the skill will appear in the Report Card report in the Reports module.

When you have finished adding assessments to the new scale, you will be able to choose that scale for assessing individual skills defined in the Skills module.

You will then be able to assign a grade when assessing a student for that skill.

After that, skills that have been evaluated with a “strong” or “weak” assessment will appear in the student's report card.  For example, the report card below shows that the student has more than adequately mastered the “Reading Comprehension” skill, but must still work to master the “Reading Diligence” skill.

Additionally, the Skills Report Card report will show a list of skills, including the assessments you have defined:

Changing the Default Scale

HomeSchool Minder also allows you to modify the pre-defined Default scale in any way you want.  For instance, you can rename the scale, add or remove assessments, or delete it altogether (if you do delete it, make sure that there is always at least one skill assessment scale defined in the system).

If you create another skill assessment scale and make it the default, then that scale will be automatically selected when a new Skill is created in the Skills module (you can always edit the skill and select a different skill assessment scale, of course).

 

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