Setting up or changing your term dates/assessment periods

[Lauren]

On Tapestry you can set up assessment periods which you can then use in the tracking screens to see where children are and how they are progressing between the periods.

We highly recommend you set these at the beginning of your academic year as changing your assessment periods during the year may alter the scores that show up in your snapshots.

When setting up your assessment periods, we suggest you set them to match your service's term dates and therefore have 4 periods. This is so you can easily see which term each outcome was achieved in. If you choose to have more or fewer you will still be able to distinguish it from most screens by choosing a 'custom period', but each staff member will have to set that manually every time they go to look at the data. I should also say that there is also an option to view data for the full year or even the entire time the child has been on Tapestry. 

As amending the term dates is a setting change, you will need to be signed into the browser version of Tapestry as a manager and go to the Control Panel by clicking on your name in the top right-hand corner then selecting 'Control Panel' from the drop-down menu.

 

 

You will then need to click on 'Settings' (1) and select 'Summative Assessments' (2) from the drop-down menu. That will take you to a page where you can see, amongst other things, the term dates you currently have set. If any, or all, of these need changing, click on the 'Change Assessment Periods' button (3).

 

 

If you do decide to reduce the number of periods you have, you can remove the extra ones by clicking on the 'X' button (1) or you can add a new period by clicking on the 'Add Period' button (2).

To change the dates, you just need to click on the drop down boxes for start/end date (3). You can change the term names by in the 'Name' boxes (4). To save your changes you will need to click on the 'Submit' button (5).

When you change your term dates it's important to remember that a new academic year on your account starts at the beginning of the first term in your list. You can see from the screenshot above that in this account our new academic year will start with Term 1 on January the 1st.

 

 

Please do be aware that changing these dates will affect your previous periods and years on Tapestry and so the scores that already exist in your snapshots may change.

If you only make a minor change, e.g. you tweak the dates within a period or change the period's name, then you're unlikely to see much change. However, any assessments that have been made as part of observations will be moved to coincide with the period in which they were made, so if any were added in the days you have tweaked, they will move. The manually overridden changes you have made to snapshots should stay where they are for minor changes but for more significant ones (e.g you change the number of periods), the manually overridden scores will be moved to whatever new period contains the last day of the old period. You can read the text box above the periods for more information about this. 

If you decide to cancel the changes before you have submitted them, you can just leave the page (either close it, or go to a different page within Tapestry) to leave them as they were. You must do that before you press submit though!

You can also choose to reset them back to Tapestry default ones by clicking on the 'Set Defaults' button (1). Once you've made your changes you then need to click on the 'Save' button (2). 

 

 

Once you press 'Save' you will be taken to a screen asking you to confirm your period changes.

If you've only made small changes, e.g. kept the same number of terms but changed some of the dates a little bit, you will be able to see your current periods (1), the new ones (2) and to continue you just need to click 'Save' (3). 

 

 

If you are trying to make larger changes e.g. changing the number of periods, not only will you see the current periods (1) and new periods (2) but you will also be shown the information about the period changes (3) and you will be presented with an information box (4). It's very important that you read this if you want to proceed because you can only go ahead after you have agreed to this (5). You won't be able to click the 'Save' button (6) until you do agree.