Our team has gotten so much detailed and useful feedback from the Classcraft community about how student analytics can be better in the platform. We’re very excited to announce that this feedback has helped to create a new student analytics page for administrators!
This page is comprised of four widgets (and more are on the way!), with each widget providing specific insight into a student’s behavior and progress. It’ll make the analytics experience far more detailed, meaningful, and easy to use. Administrators will be able to use these awesome new tools starting on Monday, February 27, but in the meantime, let’s take a moment to learn the basics of how they work.
Overview page
Before we dive into the widgets themselves, the new student analytics overview page is a great place to start. It gives a cleaner and more intuitive look at key information on a student’s behavior trends, how well they’re meeting their goals, their tiered support placement, and more.
All of the data shown is gathered from a period of time that administrators can select for both specificity and comparison purposes. If, for example, the period “last 3 months” is selected, the bar graphs for the analytics data will show a number for the last three months and compare it to the 3-month period previous to that. This is very handy for quickly and easily tracking overall progress. Each individual widget’s detailed view includes the ability to select this time period and view this comparison using its respective bar graph.
Experience Points
Keeping track of how many Experience Points (or XP) a student earns over time can be very useful in understanding their behavioral tendencies and progress, but only when you have the right information.
The new Experience Points widget gives administrators more than just a graph of how much XP a student earns over time. It provides a simple yet comprehensive look at why the student earned the XP, who awarded it to them, what part of Classcraft it was earned in, and — if the XP was awarded for positive behavior — what behavior goals the XP is relevant to.
Since students can earn XP in many different ways and for many different reasons, this widget is fantastic for getting more specificity and value out of XP as a behavior metric. If, for example, a student frequently earns XP during Boss Battles but is having a bit more trouble meeting their behavior goals, this will be easier than ever to recognize. This kind of detail is amazing for giving students exactly the behavior support they need!
Hearts
Not all educators use Hearts the same way, and some prefer to just stick to XP alone, but for many schools and districts, Hearts can be a very important indicator of student behavior. A student may, for example, lose hearts if they display negative behavior. But, not unlike XP, a student can lose Hearts for lots of different reasons (answering questions incorrectly in a Boss Battle, using a Protect power to help a teammate, etc.).
Our new Hearts widget applies the same principles as the Experience Points widget and allows administrators to easily see not only how many Hearts a student loses in the selected time period, but exactly why the student is losing them. Is it because they need more targeted behavior support to make sure they can improve behaviorally, or because they struggle a bit in Boss Battles and need academic support?
Since everyone uses Hearts differently, it’s especially important to draw informed conclusions about why Hearts are lost and what it means for the behavioral needs of the student.
Goal-based behaviors
Behavior goals are the backbone of any schoolwide or district-wide tiered support initiative. Students need clear goals and expectations in order to be their best selves, and educators need to measure progress in order to guide students toward those goals with the right support.
Setting and tracking behavior goals has always been an important feature of Classcraft for schools and districts, but our new Goal-based behaviors widget makes them even more useful, impactful, and easy to track. It shows all student behaviors — both positive and negative — sorted under the related behavior goals and how many times a student has exhibited each behavior for the selected time period.
Not only this, it shows what intervention tier is associated with the behavior, making this widget especially impactful for Tier 2 and Tier 3 students. It’s now faster and easier for administrators to get a clear and detailed look at how well a student is meeting their personalized behavior goals and exactly what support they need to progress to Tier 2 or Tier 1.
Behavior ratio
Finally, the Behavior ratio widget offers administrators a super quick and intuitive look at the ratio between positive and negative behaviors that a student is displaying. Much like the other new widgets, it also shows a sorted list of all of the student’s exhibited behaviors with their related XP earned or Hearts lost, the relevant behavior support tier, and more.
This is highly useful for observing the trends in a student’s behavior over time, particularly when viewing the behavior ratio illustrated in the tool’s bar graph. It shows administrators both the overall behavioral tendencies of a student and the specific types of behavior that they tend towards, allowing for more proactive and preventative support to take place before incidents occur.
And those are the basics of our new tools! They’ll be officially launched in Classcraft on Monday, February 27. Plus, we’ll be releasing even more in the future, so be sure to keep an eye out for our updates. The Classcraft team is so excited to keep giving you better and better tools for improving student behavior and helping them succeed!
Classroom Management - News and Updates - Technology Integration