Overview

The Passport for learning (the Passport) is a new formative assessment for students with complex learning needs, especially those needing support to establish a first language. The Passport is a holistic assessment of student development across 4 domains - Cognitive, Receptive, Expressive and Social (CRES), developed by 2 NSW Schools for Specific Purposes (SSPs) and Ylana Bloom (Speech Pathologist).

 The Passport for learning Poster assessments are teacher observation and judgement frameworks. The Passport posters can be used as an initial assessment of a student to know broadly where a student is at. This initial assessment can be done within a few minutes based on initial interactions with a student. It can be done iteratively over time, as an educator gets to better know a student and as a student achieves progress. Passport poster assessments can easily be shared between colleagues, supporting whole-school practices such as target setting, resourcing and wellbeing support.

The Passport app provides educators with a structured and systematic way to observe students and make decisions about their progress. 

Entering Poster observations 

1. Select the Year and Class or Group you want to view. To create or manage groups, refer to Managing groups.

Note: When you select a year level, you will be able to see all groups which have students in that year level. When you select a specific group, you will be able to see all students in that group irrespective of the year level selected.

2. The Overall screen displays the overall assessment activity for all the students in the class or group selected. Student tiles are sorted alphabetically from A to Z based on Last Name and can be sorted using the Sort function. 

3. Students who have not been assessed are displayed in a grey colour tile with the text 'Not assessed'. Students with Poster assessments recorded for Overall domain - most days are displayed in the corresponding colour tile. Each tile also displays sliding scale value and year of the student. 

Note: Click on the information icon i at the top of each page to access the help texts – Home, Overall, Posters, Bloom, Notes and Manage Groups. 

4. To start a poster observation for a student, click on the Start poster observation link

5. To view or edit student observations click on the Posters link.

6. To record a Poster assessment first, select the Domain and Date assessed (the Date assessed is defaulted to today's date but can be changed to a past date). Second, update the sliding scale, Passport colour group and Notes fields.

The sliding scale allows educators to choose how the student performs on Most days, a Good day and an Off day. If selecting sliding scale - No, record the Passport group colour for Most days. If selecting sliding scale - Yes, record the Passport group colour for each day - Most days, Good day and Off day. For each day, you can select 1 to 2 Passport colour groups. 

7. To move to the next student use the arrows next to the students name or search for the students name by clicking the ellipses. If the first student is selected then the left arrow key will be disabled, similarly if the last student is selected then the right arrow key will be disabled.     

8. To move to a different Domain, use the drop-down menu to select Overall, Cognitive, Receptive, Expressive or Social.                           

9. You can use the Undo button to clear any changes you made.  

10. Clicking on the ? Icon next to the Passport Poster will display useful information regarding recording Poster observations.

11. Click Save to save the observation.

12. After clicking save, you can continue to record Poster assessments for different domains or students by using the left and right arrow keys. To exit the Poster assessment data entry page, click on the Close button.

13. Important - for entering observations on the Passport poster page

When starting a new Poster assessment for the first time, you must select a Passport colour group if you make any of the following changes: change the Date assessed; change the sliding scale to Yes; enter anything in the Notes field. If you make any of these changes, you will not be able to save until you select a Passport colour group.

If you are editing a previously saved Passport poster assessment colour group observation, ensure that you have selected a colour group for Most days before saving. You will not be able to move on, if you unselect a previously saved Passport colour group and then try to save.  

When sliding scale - Yes is selected for a student, and you have selected a Passport colour group for Most days in any Poster domain. You will not be able to save until you select Passport colour groups for Good day and Off day for those domains.

When sliding scale - Yes is selected for a student, and you have already entered data for Good day and Off day for any domain, if you change the sliding scale to No, a warning message will appear to confirm that if you proceed, you will lose previously entered data.

Note: There is an auto save feature which gets triggered when you enter any observations and click on the arrow keys to move to a different student. In case you make any changes a message is displayed ‘Unsaved changes’, if you try to navigate from the pages without saving a confirmation pop up will be displayed.             

Connectivity: If internet connectivity is lost when you are entering observations a message would be displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen. Please don't make any further changes and do not refresh the page until connectivity is restored or any entered data will be lost.

Once connectivity is restored you will see this message in the bottom right corner of the screen and you may continue to use the application. 

14. If a Poster assessment is in progress, then a tick with dotted circles is displayed on the student tile for that record, if all questions have been answered then a tick with complete circle is displayed. The letters (O C R E S) refer to the completed domains O - Overall, C - Cognitive,  R - Receptive, E - Expressive and S - Social.

15. Click on the Profile button on the student tile to view the high-level summary of observations recorded for both Posters and Bloom assessment. 

• The first section - Poster profile, displays the observations entered for each of the selected days, across all of the domains. Click on the pencil icon as shown below to navigate to the Passport poster assessment data entry page. 
• You can export the Poster profile data of a specific student by clicking on the Export poster profile button. The exported file will be downloaded in a PDF format. If the student does not have any Poster observations recorded the Export poster profile button will be disabled.

• The second section - Bloom assessment, visually displays in a column graph format, the number of Bloom assessment questions that a Passport colour group has been recorded for.  

• The last section displays the most recent history of the Poster and Bloom assessment. It will also display the count of modifications done for both Poster as well as Bloom.If the student has not been assessed, this message will be displayed - 'This student does not have any Bloom/Poster assessments recorded yet'.

• Clicking on View all history button will display the complete history for both Poster and Bloom in separate tabs.
• In the Poster tab, each history record will display the domain, notes, date, name of the person entering the observation, sliding scale (yes or no) and Passport colour group for each day selected.

• Each section on the profile screen has information icons i, clicking on the icons will display more information on each section.

Viewing the Poster data wall

1. Click on the Posters tab. 

2. Select the Assessment Period and Domain. The data displayed will change based on the selection of these two filters. Default selection here will be Overall and As at today.

3. The screen will display the poster observations for all students in the specified group or class.

4. You will also find the year and class/group for which the observation was recorded below each student name. In case the student doesn’t have a sliding scale, you will see text ‘No sliding scale’ displayed. Click on the sort button, to sort the students by last name, either A-Z or Z-A.

5. The legend for the sliding scale days' icons can be found on the top right corner of this screen. If a student has the same Passport colour group across 2 days, the icons will be displayed together, separated by a '&' symbol.

6. Clicking on any of the Poster assessment sliding scale days' icons, will navigate to the Passport poster assessment entry page.

 7.    Click the Keys button to view the colour-coded keys for Posters. 

8.    To export the Posters data in a PDF file, select Export which appears on the top right of the screen. 

9.    The PDF report displays all the data displayed on the app screen. You will need to change the Domain and Date assessed filters on the app screen in order to export relevant data.

Export observation notes

1.    To export observation details for both Poster and Bloom in an excel file, click on the Notes tab. 

2.    Select the Passport tool, Domain, student/s, and date assessed filters to export the relevant data.  You can select a specific student or multiple students or all students in the student filter. Date assessed can be today’s date, present week, term or year. You can also select a specific date range by selecting a From and To year, week and term.

Note: Domain value Overall will be disabled when the Passport tool selected is Bloom Blue-Red or Red-Green since the Bloom assessment doesn’t have that value.

3.     Click on the Export button

4.    The Excel report displays the observation details according to the selected filters. This file export combines the data for both Posters and Bloom assessments. The Poster Days columns only contains data for students with recorded Poster assessments. Similarly, the Semester and Year columns only contains data for students with recorded Bloom assessments. The Legend tab has the same colour keys that is displayed on the app.