Skills

Skills are qualitative phrases that describe a measurement of student performance. Skills-Based marking periods reply on skills to determine what skills are associated with courses.

To get started:

  1. From the persona menu, select Academics.

  2. Select Grades, then Grading setup, then Skills.

The Skills list contains all skills across all grade groups. Skills are reusable, and each instance of a skill is represented in the Grade group column. The Type column is populated based on the group that the skill is added to within a marking period.

Mastery skill equivalents

If your school uses Mastery Learning, a mastery skill equivalent can be set up for each of your skills. The mastery skill equivalent can be a transferable skill or sub-skill, or a content-area skill or sub-skill.

While skills can be included on report cards, mastery skills cannot. Setting a mastery skill equivalent for a skill allows the mastery skill rating in a teacher's gradebook to be pulled in as a grade for the corresponding skill so that it can be included on report cards.

  • A skill can only have either a transferable skill equivalent or a content-area skill equivalent, not both.

  • A mastery skill can only be selected as the equivalent for one skill.

  • Both mastery skills and sub-skills are available to be selected as equivalents.

  • If a skill is mapped to a parent transferable skill or parent content-area skill, the sub-skills under the parent are averaged.

Teachers pull their mastery skill ratings from their gradebook into skill grades using the Calculate option in Grading. For more information, see Grading - Teacher Perspective.

Tip: For a tutorial on setting up grading at your school, see The Guide to Grading Setup.

  1. Select New skill.

  2. Enter a Description (for example, "Counting by fours," "Shares with others," "Contributes to class discussions").

  3. New skills default to Active. If you're not ready to use a skill, deselect Active.

  4. Optional: If your school uses Mastery Learning, search for and select a Mastery skill equivalent for this skill.

    Tip: In the search results, skills display Transferable skill or Content-area skill. Sub-skills display Associated transferable skill or Associated content-area skill.

  5. Select Save & Close or Save & Add Another.

  6. The skill is now available to be added to a Skills-Based marking period within School Year Setup.

To change the information displayed in the Skills list, select Columns, make your selections, and then Apply changes.

To narrow down the list, select the Filter icon. You can filter the list by Status and Skills-Based type option. Select Apply filters when you have made your selections.

To download the list of skills as a CSV spreadsheet file, select Export. The file will save in your internet browser's download folder.

Data managers can import new skills and update existing skills via Grading Data Import.

Tip: Use Export to export the skill_id needed to update existing skills via import and Export in Content-area skills list and Transferable skills list to export the mastery skill information necessary when mapping new or existing skills to mastery skills via import.