Set Up Gradebooks

Before School Year

By basing the gradebook set up on research and evidence, teams can establish an essential technical and pedagogical framework for tracking student achievement and identifying early warning signs in real time that works for the local context of their district. To do so requires a technical and data infrastructure that moves beyond simple point entry to support automated “completeness of data” flagging, customizable score codes, and weighted categories aligned across departments. By using the Optimal Technical and Data Infrastructure Checklist, teams can ensure their systems have essential functionalities, like supporting mastery-based configurations and providing multi-level drilldown views from the individual student to the entire grade level.

Technical Infrastructure Choose Plays Examples in Practice

Technical Infrastructure

Before diving into the technical configuration steps to set up gradebooks, we encourage your team to ensure your technical infrastructure is ready for this effort. Gradebook configuration is typically managed in your student information system or learning management system. In the case you aren’t sure, this checklist will generate a set of questions you can ask the district or provider for clarity. In the case where you know the system(s) cannot do something, this checklist offers considerations for building workaround solutions.

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Data Integrity & Governance

Is your system set up to automatically flag data errors and generate data completeness reports?

Workaround Option 1:
Export student data into Excel or a similar tool with spreadsheet capabilities. To check for duplicate data, “pivot” on a unique value (e.g., each student likely has a unique ID assigned to them). Go to “insert” and select “pivot”, enabling the ability to create a table that shows how many instances of each student ID show up in the exportd data. If there are ever two or more instances, it means that there is duplicate student data. requiring the need to work with the district to have extraneous records removed. Conditional formatting, which typically appears as an option under “format” helps easily spot where data is missing by setting cells without data or with null data to highlight in specific colors. It’s then possible to sort the data by color so determine which data needs to be updated.
Workaround Option 2:
If the valid data values are known, set up exceptions reports—within your on-track system, if possible, or in Excel or another analytics tool (e.g. Power BI or Tableau)—to query for missing or inaccurate values. Focus on the highest-priority predictive indicator data first.
Ai-enabled workaround:
If the district has a closed and secure AI tool and allows the upload of student identifying information and data, export the raw data and prompt the AI tool to visibly flag (e.g., add colors) or add a column to capture the specific issues that need to be identified and resolved. Consider including instructions for how outlier data values should be treated (e.g., if there is a null value, treat it like a zero). Prompt the AI to explain the steps taken with the data to produce the output requested and to share any inconsistencies, risks, or issues with the data and how they have been resolved or attended to in the resulting report. If any of the explanations are not clear or do not make sense, prompt the AI to alter the approach it takes to flagging the data. If the report is rerun, prompt the AI to call out the specific changes in each iteration from the prior version(s). Remember to at least spot check the data against the source data to ensure accuracy. Ensure responsible use of AI by referring to the Considerations for AI Use section of this playbook.

System Configuration & Customization

Is your system set up to function as the gradebook for everyday use (for assignment tracking and marking-period reporting) with customized weights, score codes, and population logic (standardized at the school or district level)?

Intuitive Insights & Dashboards

Is your system set up to enable role-based access to dashboards with gradebook data and drill-down capability dictated by the appropriate permissions?

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