Pace

Pace

Pace

In a competency-based system, answering the question "How is my student doing?" can be difficult. Activity scores, overall standards scores, goals, and progress can make the answer fairly complex for many students and parents. In order to address this issue, Empower has developed a method to distill all this data down into one simple metric. We call this Pacing.

To put it simply, Empower compares three pieces of data to calculate pace:
  1. Where a student is in their learning (Summative Target Scores)
  2. The Targets being covered in a Course
  3. The duration of the course

By comparing these three pieces of data, Empower can present users with a pacing meter comparing where the student is presently in the learning and where they probably should be to complete the content on time.  




This video focuses on automated Course Pacing as best practice and shows how to manually adjust that. At the end there are also nods to Goal Setting and Personalized Learning Plans and their influence on Pace. 



Why is Pace Important?

Pace is a very valuable metric for two main reasons: Pressure to Achieve and Guardian Communication.

Pressure to Achieve refers to the need to motivate students to keep learning. Even if we are able to allow students more time if they need it, we still do have a limited amount of time with them and we want to avoid students developing poor work habits by taking advantage of the system. A pacing meter provides information to all stakeholders which will inform if a student needs to pick up the pace or if they can perhaps tap the brakes and give themselves more time in an area where they do need to spend some extra time. 

Guardian Communication can make or break our efforts. Parents most commonly won't know what a 2.5 means, for example, but "On Pace" will be immediately understood. Because pace is front and center in Empower, it also serves as an opportunity to control the messaging that is going home. Empower can automatically calculate pace, but teachers also have the option of manually overriding each student's pace to make sure the proper message is being communicated to guardians. 

The below videos give a good overview of Pace in Empower and more details can be found in the rest of the article below. 





Viewing Pace

Students and Parents will see Pace prominently displayed on their homepages.




Teachers can see pace either by viewing as the student...
  1. Open a gradebook or go to Reporting Tab>Roster Tool and find the student's user icon
  2. Click the student's user icon
  3. View Homepage
...or on the Goal Dashboard
  1. Have a class/group selected on your home page
  2. Go to the Reporting Tab
  3. Select Goal Dashboard
  4. Adjust Filters as desired


The List View offers more details about student pace.




Course Pace

For Empower to automatically run pace based on courses, a course playlist must be assigned to the class. Learn about courses HERE. 
When working with courses, the answer to the question "How is the student doing?" is Pace. Because scores will grow over time, an in-progress score that is based purely on summative numbers, may not give us the information needed in this case. 

With course playlists assigned to a class/group, pacing will run automatically. It is a function of the standards aligned to the Course Playlist Big Idea over time.

Students are expected to complete the Targets in the Big Idea of the Course Playlist by the end of the course period. 

Standards can be weighted in the Target Browser if, say, one takes twice as long as the rest. This will be factored into the calculation. Read more about this below. 

Pacing updates in real-time. It doesn't need to run overnight. 


Report: LF Scoring Practices

Course Pace is only as accurate as the data underlying it. 

Available by request, the report called LF Scoring Practices is similar to Empower's Teacher Activity Report, but with more specific information which can help administrators ensure that teachers are entering appropriate data at appropriate intervals. 


Q: How is pace determined if there are no Course Playlists?
A: Pace can be manually set, but without a course playlist assigned to the class/group, there is no automated pace, because Empower doesn't know the full scope of the work that will be covered in that class/group over the course of the term. 


Set or Override Pace Manually

Pace can be set manually by teachers. If courses are not set up or assigned, manual pace setting can be a good strategy to communicate student progress home.

If any manual pacing is set for students, it will override any course or goal-based pacing that may be set.

Go to 7:44 on the below video to see this done. 



How Pace is Calculated



Once a Course is assigned to a Group or Class, then Empower will calculate pacing based on course duration (days), current date, and the number of total scores on standards in the Big Idea. This is the equivalent of setting a goal automatically based on the course playlist info.

For example, the course length is 4 months: 1 September - 31 December. Let's say you are checking the student progress report on the date of 1 October. That means that 25% of the course duration has passed (ratio is calculated correctly based on days count). Let's also say that the course contains 8 standards. In this case, there are 48 units of growth (for any particular standard, a unit of growth is a half-point of growth on the scale - 0.0 to 0.5, 0.5 to 1.0, 1.0 to 1.5, 1.5 to 2.0, 2.0 to 2.5, and 2.5 to 3.0). 

25% of 48 units would be 12 units of growth. So, if the student completes 12 units of growth on any combination of standards by the date of 1 October, he will be "On pace", if they complete 13 or more, then they will be "Ahead of pace".

Use this spreadsheet to explore how calculations are made. 

Things to note ...
  1. Weekends and holidays are not counted, so expected growth does not increase on these days.
  2. Even if a student does not complete a standard but they have a score 1.0 on one standard, this still counts towards expected learning and can keep a student on pace. Any growth "counts" towards pacing.
  3. Targets can be weighted, meaning if a student makes progress on a target that is more heavily weighted it will accelerate the accomplished growth.
  4. If a teacher overwrites the pace by manually entering it using the Progress Report Comments tool, then the system will use the teacher's entered pace for the parent and student home pages and on the progress reports.
  5. To revert a manually set pace back to being automated, select the default (blank) option at the top of the list.
  6. The teacher enters pace in the context of a reporting period. Once the period is over the pace is no longer 'held' for the new period. At the start of a new progress period, automation resumes. 
  7. Nothing above 3.0 moves the pace meter. Otherwise, a 4.0 would offset a 2.0 and we wouldn't be holding the student to mastery in that case. 
  8. If you are a district using words instead of numbers, this still calculates the same in the background.
  9. If you are a district that does not use half-points (which we strongly discourage), then each unit of growth is actually 2 units (0.0 to 1.0, 1.0 to 2.0, and 2.0 to 3.0) in the calculation.

Go to 3:28 on the below video to see another explanation of how Pace is calculated. 



Buffers of Pace 

Normally, there is a 5% buffer for pacing to allow for the reality that not all targets are taught for the same length of time (a more detailed way to approach this is below in the "Weighting Targets" section). However, this can be adjusted at the high OR the low end if a school chose to.  Here is an example of how it works.


1. calculated expected progress based on current date, goal dates, developmental level and developmental goal value. let it be value E.
2. calculated real progress based on overall standards scores (PLPs, MASes, standards weights, everything is considered). Let it be value R.
3. Lets say pacing buffer is set to 5%. Please notice that on site yearly setup form there are two pacing buffer values, this is done specially, so that on pace interval could be larger. Assume it is 5% on both left and right.
4. This is how pacing is calculated:
If R > 1.05*E then "Ahead of pace"
If R < 0.95*E then "Behind pace"
Else "On pace"
5. Let say you want to extend On pace interval to the left, then you setup "Lower" pacing boundary for example 20%. Upper boundary is still 5%, then it will be the following:
if R > 1.05*E then "Ahead of pace"
If R < 0.8*E then "Behind pace"
Else "On pace"
You can adjust these in the Site Admin tool (warning: do not change this during a school year without alerting your CSR!!).


Weighting Targets

If some targets are expected to take longer to learn, they can be weighted. The weights are relative, with 1.0 being the default. So setting a weight to 2.0, means that the target is expected to take twice as long as most others.

Weight targets in the Standards Editor
  1. Empower Tools Menu 
  2. Standards Editor
  3. Select a Content Area
  4. Select the Target to edit
  5. Adjust the Weight field
  6. Save



1. How is pacing affected by weighting targets?

Example: if I have 8 targets in a class, and I assign a weight to two of them as 2.0, I will then have the equivalent of 10 targets, correct? And those two "weighted" targets will count for twice as much in the pacing, correct?

--> Yes this is correct. Let's suppose MAS is 3.0 for these 8 targets. The total score that student needs to achieve is 30.00 (and not 24.00) because the weight on two standards is 3.0) by the end of the course to be 'ON PACE'. When the student achieves a score on those 2 weighted standards, it will be counted as twice while calculating pacing.

2. Does weighting targets also affect the course score, as those targets in the above example count for twice as much as the others?

-> No! Weighting targets does not affect the course score.


Go to 11:15 on the below video to see more about weighting courses.


Pacing Periods


Pacing periods are used when the usual start/end dates of a course are not ideal for calculating pacing. For example, there may be something happening near the beginning of school that takes the learners out of their usual classroom time (off-campus trips, bonding experiences, start-of-school assemblies, etc), and pacing would therefore be less useful near the beginning of the year. Pacing periods can help with those possibilities!

To create these custom periods, an Empower administrator (or e-admin) would select the "Pacing Periods" tile from the menu.



From there, you would see these as possibilities:



As you see, these are set up using the school year (usually the current one), the school site, and then you make some choices.



It is possible to have multiple pacing periods in a school. You can also select content areas to have pacing periods, or specific course playlists. Please see your CSR for questions!

Goal Pacing

Course pacing as described above is the standard practice, but Empower does have tools to allow each student to have individualized goals. Learn about that in this video.




Graduation Pacing

Empower can also provide a larger view of pacing - how close is a student to "graduating", be it from high school or some other group of grade levels (this can be set up by a district). This is a condensed version of the My Learning tab.

Once the My Learning tab has been set up, there is a little more information needed to add Graduation Pacing to a learner's homepage.

First, the courses need to have a Graduation Area selected.



Second, our technicians will also need some other information for the backend (this is not available in the user interface).

a) Start_Semester (Grade level in which that graduation area will start) 
b) End_Semester (Grade level in which that graduation area will end)
c) Pace_Percent (This is the number of credits that need to be met after each grade level end. Suppose a Graduation area starts from 9th grade and ends in 12th grade and Pace_Percent value is 5.00. The student needs 10 credits at the end of 9th grade in order to be On Pace and 40 credits at the end of 12th grade).
d) FirstSemEndDate and SecondSemEndDate for GraduationAreaPacing calculations



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