Getting the most out of homework analytics

Cover Sheet

Perhaps the most useful information you will see on this sheet is the 'Start Date' and 'End Date' of the report you have just downloaded.

Please be patient...

...as there is a lot of data contained within these analytic reports.  For this reason they are currently restricted to 2-week periods to avoid timeouts during download, although this will change when planned updates to the portal are released.  Meanwhile, users are urged to be patient when downloading and using the analytics Excel workbooks as these may take some time to populate with data.

Useful Tip:

If you are seeing a lot of empty fields, sometimes clicking on any empty fields will prompt these to populate.

Using 'Raw Data' to check a teacher is setting homework

Let's imagine that you are in charge of an English Department within your school and you want to check to see the teachers within your department are consistently setting homework.

Step 1

We recommend you search by 'Subject' rather than 'Teacher', because many teachers these days will teach more than one subject and somebody in your department could also be teaching Drama, a subject that you are not in charge of and therefore do not wish to see homework data on.

Go to 'column S' in the 'Raw Data' sheet and click on the filter icon at the top (it looks a like a downward facing 'Play' button).

Step 2

Click on the drop down list to the right hand side of 'Choose One' and you will see a list subjects.  Select your subject (English).

Now click on the dropdown list where it says 'Choose One' and select 'Equals' and close the filter (be patient, remember it may take some time to work).

Step 3

Now go to 'column AA' (Teacher Last Name) in the same 'Raw Data' sheet and click on the filter icon at the top.

Repeating the use of dropdown lists as you did in Step 2, set the drop down list on the left to 'Equals' and then select the teacher you want to check using the drop down list on the right.

In this example, we want to look at Mr Bertrand's homework.

Step 4

Now we can see a complete list of homework tasks set by member of staff, Ryan Bertrand in the table above.  Right away, if we zoom in, we can see that 'Of Mice and Men' book review was a homework task he set for his Year 8 English class.

Why is the homework task listed for every student?

This is because Milk measures the ratings and completion rates of each homework assignment against the individual student and the class.  So in the example below, viewing the 'Statistics' sheet, we can see that Ms Claire Connolly (row 10) has set 99 'Assignments' (instances of homework).

This does not mean that Ms Claire Connolly has set homework for 99 classes.  Instead this would be due to the fact she has 33 students in her class, so she has actually only set a homework task for a class 3 times (3 x 33 = 99 Assignments).

Student Assignment (%)

This column represents the percentage of total homework (set by every teacher using Milk across the whole school) set by any given teacher.

In the example below,  Ms Claire Connolly (row 10, column D) has set 2.7% of the homework in her school during the last 2 weeks.

Important:  All percentage (%) values are against the entire school population (not the teacher sample).

For example, in the past 2 weeks, Mrs Catherine Hlavacek (row 9) has set 6.1% of homework for the entire school (column D), so far 1.1% of homework for the entire school has been received by her (column H) while 5% is still 'In Progress' (column F).

How to tell if teachers are marking homework as 'Received' using Milk

Teachers should be encouraged to indicate homework outcomes (e.g., received, received, late, pardoned, etc.,) using Milk.  After all, what's teh point in setting a homework task if you are not going to record its completion and give marking feedback?  

Recording homework outcomes provides a sound evidence base within Milk analytics to produce to the school inspectorate or refer to for internal management pruposes.  

Just as importantly, marking every student's homework outcome in a class group indicates to Milk that the homwork task has been completed and this action automatically removes the task from the task list viewed by both stdents and parents (so if users are complaining that their task lists are mounting it's most likely because teachers are not indicating homework outcomes).

Comparing columns C and G can be a good indicator as to whether a teacher is recording homework outcomes, assuming that at least 50% of homework tasks set will be received within the 2-week period of the report*.

*Future releases of Milk will provide longer time frames for comparison and should make it easier to identify which teachers are not recording homework submissions.