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Contents

Key Entities

This domain contains:

• An Assessment A Survey entity that describes assessments surveys along with associated metadata.
• A LearningStandard entity that drives the curriculum and the assessments.A StudentAssessment SurveyResponse entity that holds assessment survey results and administration metadata for an overall assessmentsurvey, objective assessmentssurvey section, and individual assessment itemssurvey questions.

Key Concepts

The key concepts include the following:

• Assessments may encompass any tests, quizzes, or other instruments that evaluate student learning.

• The overall domain is primarily designed to capture student assessment results and not to recreate assessment instruments. The assessment instrument metadata is modeled to support recording and proper interpretation of a student’s results.

• The assessment model is flexible enough to convey results from complex tests such as the SAT and ACT exams, large tests such as state-level standardized tests, and simple tests such as classroom benchmark assessments or quizzes.

• The LearningStandard entity models both a general representation of an abstract learning concept or skill and specific elements within the realm of an objective. The source and scope are defined by the Namespace and LearningStandardScope elements, respectively.

• The ObjectiveAssessment entity is a subset of items on an assessment that may have its own score, performance levels, or academic subject and that can be tied to learning standards.

Hierarchial Model

The Ed-Fi data model for assessments contains a number of entities and reference patterns. While its scope may make it a bit imposing to newcomers, understanding a few design principles enable it to be easily understood and adopted.

Assessment and ObjectiveAssessment Example

Many assessments are multi-tier in the sense that they provide multiple scores or result sets for each assessment. An example would be a single "reading" assessment that tested multiple skill areas, such as "Reading Comprehension," "Accuracy and Fluency," "Phonemic Awareness," and so forth.

In the Assessment domain, the top-level assessment is an Assessment entity and the skill areas are ObjectiveAssessment entities. This structure is recursive, so that there can be any number of levels of ObjectiveAssessments.

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Once a student takes an assessment, the results can be modeled in the StudentAssessment entity and StudentObjectiveAssessment common type, each of which has references back to its parent or peer entities.

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Support for Mapping to Local Learning Standards

Field implementation has shown that, while school systems will intake into their systems the results of student assessments in areas like "Reading Comprehension" (in other words, the ObjectiveAssessment entity with student results held in the StudentObjectiveAssessment entity), they also commonly need to map those "Reading Comprehension" results to learning benchmarks. The LearningStandard entity enables the ObjectiveAssessment to be mapped to an education standard. Further, the LearningStandard entity may be a locally defined benchmark or a formal, external learning standard, such as one provided by the state or Common Core State Standards.

The structure looks like this:

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The source of the data is typically as follows:

• The Survey domain is composed of two sections, the inquiry side (Survey, SurveySection, SurveyQuestion) and the response side (SurveyResponse, SurveySectionResponse, SurveyQuestionResponse).
• On the inquiry side, the primary entity is the Survey entity. The Survey entity acts to create a template for questions to be presented to a survey taker. The Survey can optionally be attached to an Education Organization, School Year, or Term. Surveys can also be categorized via the SurveyCategoryDescriptor. 
• Adding an optional SurveySection to a survey allows for further grouping of questions within a survey. This enables the survey designer to create a survey with multiple topics but still organized in a way that makes sense to the survey taker. SurveySection also enables a more complete analysis of the completed survey.
• The SurveyQuestion entity is the heart of the survey domain. These are the questions that make up the survey. Each SurveyQuestion has a field for the text of the question being asked. Each question can expect the answer in a number of different forms.
• The SurveyResponse entity is a response to a survey, and holds information about the respondent such as full name, e-mail address, date survey was taken, and the amount of time it took to complete the survey. The SurveyResponse entity also has holds a link to the person-type entity that took this survey (Student, Staff, or Parent). Survey responses can also target a person type (Student, Staff) as well as an Education Organization.
• The SurveySectionResponse entity brings together a survey response with a survey section, again allowing for a specific grouping of survey question answers. The SurveyResponse entity also adds a rating field, so that that section of the survey can be rated against other SurveySectionResponses for that survey. Like the SurveyResponse entity above, the SurveySection entity can also target a person type (Student, Staff) as well as an Education Organization.
• The SurveyQuestionResponse entity contains the response to an individual SurveyQuestion as well as a link back to the original SurveyQuestion asked (this way, the text of the question being answered is always available). The responses can take many forms, including free text, numeric responses, and matrix responses.