Introducing Hierarchical Standards

For years, JumpRope has allowed districts, schools, or teachers to create their standards and learning targets in JumpRope.  In addition, we have allowed these standards to be aligned to higher-level "National Standards" which are often Common Core but can also include other custom sets of national, state, or even district-level standards.  However, to date our system has not allowed a second level of teacher-created standards, a complex hierarchy of district-controlled standards, or complex reporting across the higher-level standards.

Many schools have been asking for a way to create "long-term targets" or similar alongside their teacher-created targets.  For the last three years, we've worked with these schools to develop a workaround involving the use of JumpRope's "units" as long term targets, an effective but somewhat clunky solution.

We're pleased to announce today that we have developed and begun to test a brand new version of our Plan tab -- along with related improvements to our Grade entry interface and additional options in mastery reports -- to enable true use of "hierarchical standards" in our system.  This includes features that make the interface easier for teachers to use and understand alongside powerful features to adjust reports, mastery calculations, and management options to support this new layer.  Several schools have been using this new interface throughout the spring, and it will be available to all schools and districts in the fall.

If you're interested in using this new interface, we'd appreciate your taking some time to look through the below summary of the changes and give us some feedback.  Should you opt in to using the new interface, we'd love to hear your feedback as soon as possible in order to make sure that we are meeting everyone's needs.  Please send any questions, comments, or ideas to support@jumpro.pe.  We hope you are as excited as we are!

What's new with JumpRope's Hierarchical Standards?

1.  A re-designed, streamlined Plan tab.  The new Plan tab collapses our "three-step" backwards design process into a single step, so teachers no longer need to constantly "zoom" between the steps to create units, standards, and assessments.  Additionally, you can see all of your standards (and, yes, the whole "hierarchy" of standards) for your course all at once instead of having to look at things a unit at a time. http://screencast.com/t/oFKqGPuYj
   
   
2. Introducing the Standard Bank to help you organize standards for your classroom, school, or district.  Instead of having to type your standards, clone units, or search and import from the Common Core (all of which are still possible), a teacher/school/district can now maintain a bank of standards that can be associated with courses in the Plan tab.  That way, you can easily share standards between your courses without having multiple copies of your units and standards.  http://screencast.com/t/o4ckXZljb
   
   
1. For those of your using "units" in JumpRope as long-term standards currently, you have the option of switching over to true hierarchical standards to take advantage of these new features.  Teachers can now create true long-term standards instead of the workaround of using units -- this leads to a significant improvement in the overall usability of the system, as well as improvements to the reports that you can run.
   
   
3. Organize your assessments by Unit, and easily align them to any standard.  Your standards are no longer tied to specific units, making units a handy way to keep organized with your curriculum without the need to worry about how they affect mastery reports.  This also means that unit dates are no longer as important to maintain (more on this below).
4. Introducing the Calendar view in the Plan tab.  Those of you that use JumpRope to organize your classroom assessments and units can now view and print a calendar of your planning data in the Plan tab!  You can even add or edit assessments and units directly from the calendar.  http://screencast.com/t/peCLk6g0AYJI
   
   
5. Reports now filter by assessment date (by default) instead of Unit dates.  Since we first launched our gradebook, we've stuck behind the idea that mastery reports should ideally show "the entire body of evidence" for any included standard (in other words, any time you look at the mastery of a standard, the score should be based on all available assessments).  As such, our mastery reports have always filtered by the date of our "Units," and thus teachers needed to keep the unit dates up to date to make sure that they matched instruction and reporting needs.  Based on a lot of feedback and our own observations over the years -- along with some of the changes planned for hierarchical standards -- we are changing this behavior moving forward.  From now on, mastery reports will filter by the due date of the assessment instead of the date range of the units.  We believe this to be more intuitive and simpler to manage in the long run.
6. New advanced features.
1. Rigor Rating.  When dealing with long-term targets, the difference between a formative, scaffolded assessment and a summative, rigorous assessment can be quite drastic (think an early practice activity vs. a final exam).  You can now tell JumpRope how "rigorous" a given assessment is (think: if you meet expectations on this activity, what level of mastery would that represent on the overall standard?) and JumpRope will help teachers, students, and parents visualize their progress toward mastery in the context of the degree of rigor offered by the teacher so far.  This helps answer the question "is the student on track" throughout the learning process, even before summative assessments are given.                     
7. Coming soon: improvements to the Grade tab to make score entry even easier.  We have always taken care to make sure that the Grade entry interface in JumpRope is as easy to use as possible given the complexity of mastery data.  We are testing improvements that allow teachers to see more data at a time in the Grade tab, so that you aren't limited to a single assessment or standard.