Report Cards
Report cards are the most vital communication between home and school. Since they convey personal information about the progress of their children, parents are highly motivated to read every detail.
Schools have a vested interest in ensuring that report cards have a professional appearance, convey a positive image of the school to parents, and present accurate, helpful information in a readily interpreted format. Every detail is important, including the subject descriptions and reporting categories, the marking schemes used, the layout of the information, the choice of fonts, and the use of color and graphic elements.
Good report card designs take a lot of work to develop and typically represent the combined effort of the school principal, teaching staff and representative parents. In order to derive maximum benefit from their labour, schools sometimes work together, perhaps through a school association, to develop report card designs for use in several schools. If carefully defined, a report card design can be shared by several classes and grades, so that unique designs are only needed for each division (or level).
Overseer Reports was developed to meet the expectations of independent schools, and school associations, for a software application capable of capturing the details of a report card design, and then encapsulating the design into a single file which can be transferred to school administrative staff for easy installation and use. If used, school logos and other graphic images are distributed as separate files.
The design files created by Overseer Reports are fully integrated with the Overseer Suite of applications. Each design file may be imported into Overseer Admin for one or more classes in order to make the associated report card design available to teachers of those classes. Any graphic files required are simply added to the database directory.
Report card designs created via Overseer Reports can use any of three paper sizes (Letter, Legal and A4) and any of five layouts (Portrait with no folds; Portrait with 1 fold; Landscape with no folds; Landscape with 1 fold and Landscape with 2 folds). These options, together with margins etc. are specified through the General tabsheet of a design form within the application.
A separate Fonts tabsheet supports the definition of any true type fonts which the designer chooses to use for one or more design elements to be placed on report cards. Each defined font is a named font with designated facename, font size, style and color. Once defined centrally for the entire report card, the font may be referenced one or more times by name only when used to display report card design elements (see below). This makes it easy to re-define any named font centrally and have it immediately take effect throughout the report card design.
A separate Lines tabsheet supports the definition of lines which the designer may then reference by name throughout the report card design. Each line has a defined width and color.
Student marks for each term may be reported by subject areas, subject components and/or by subject categories. These classifications must be defined in the report card design itself. Actual term marks will be recorded later by teachers, either directly (via Overseer Admin or LAN) or indirectly (via Overseer Grades) prior to printing report cards.
Within Overseer, subject areas are major classifications of subjects (e.g. “Mathematics”) under which secondary subject components (e.g. “Concepts” and “Problem Solving”) may be defined. Both may be used to report marks on report cards.
Later, if Overseer Grades is used by teachers to log student progress during each term, then one or more tests may be defined under each subject component via Overseer Grades. Only the weighted average of these test marks can be transferred to report cards under the respective subject component. Subject area marks can also be reported on report cards. Each mark is the weighted average of all subject component marks for the relevant subject area.
Subject categories are line items for reporting symbolic marks based on subjective assessments of student progress, i.e. they are not based on actual test marks. Although associated with a subject component, subject categories are independent indicators of student progress.
The classification of line items for reporting student marks (e.g. by subject areas, subject components and/or subject categories) should be fully defined on paper by school staff before entering the information via Overseer Reports.
Once the reporting classifications are known, all subject components and their associated subject categories may be defined via the Subject Comp’s tabsheet of Overseer Reports. Then the subject components must be placed within the appropriate subject areas via the Subject Areas tabsheet.
Any text strings which need to be placed between clusters of marks on report cards can be defined as text blocks via the Text Blocks tabsheet. Examples are scripture texts, parent signature prompts, promotion status prompts etc.
Having pre-defined many of the design elements to be used on report cards, the next step is to sequentially position these in columns on logical pages or as independently positioned page elements.
Column elements must be specified via the Columns tabsheet of a report card design. The column elements list is a single list within which all column elements for all columns in the entire report card design are placed. The New Column elements are shown in red to make it easy to identify the top of each column. Available column design elements are the following:
- New Column
- Space
- Days Absent
- Times Late
- Overall Average Marks
- Subject Area Marks
- Subject Component Marks
- Subject Component Categories
- Subject Area Comments
- Term Header Labels
- Term Comments
- Text Block
- Title Bar
Unlike the above column design elements, page elements may be defined and positioned within any valid rectangular area on any page. Page elements include tables which may be defined via the Tables tabsheet. Page elements must be specified via the Logical Pages tabsheet of a report card design. The page elements list is a single list within which all page elements for all logical pages in the entire report card design are placed. The New Page elements are shown in red to make it easy to identify the top of each page. The following are the eligible design elements which may be placed in the list:
- New Page
- Horizontal Text
- Vertical Text
- Table
- Line Segment
- Graphic
- Check Box
- Footer
Overseer Reports does not support previewing report card designs on the screen. However, it does provide two menu options for printing test report cards and blank report cards. These are sufficient to confirm the layout of information on report cards, but they do not include any student information. Printing of actual student data can only be performed via Overseer Admin and/or Overseer LAN after the design file is installed via Overseer Admin (see the sample report card produced from the information in the sample design file used above).
Upon completion of a report card design, the design may be saved to a file and distributed to users for immediate installation and use. The designs may be password-protected to protect copyright. Future refinement of designs is easy to perform by editing information in one or more tabsheets of the design form within Overseer Reports.
