Subject Analysis is the part of Smartgrade which lets you compare data from two or more subjects that belong to the same Assessment Family. You access it via the SUBJECT button of the Analysis area main page:
Using the filters, you can select the subjects you want to include in the analysis. If you are a MAT, you can select the schools you want to compare. You can also select the Year Group and Classes you want to compare too:
Next, click the OPTIONS & FILTERS button on the right-hand side. Here, you can choose the gradeset to display in the subject analysis report (for instance the Global Percentile Rank achieved in each of the subjects you’ve selected):
Once you have selected your subjects and chosen the gradeset you want to group by, the report will then display that chosen grade for each student and for each subject, allowing you to compare your grouping (e.g students, classes, schools).
In the example above, we can see:
- The Global Percentile Rank of the student in the first row across all 3 subjects that belong to this assessment family. This offers an easy way to spot broad subject weaknesses for individual students.
- The average Global Percentile Rank for each subject for the grouping (in this case, a class) as a whole. If one particular subject is lower than the others across the class as a whole, this can easily be identified.
- The average Global Percentile Rank for each student across all 3 subjects, with the class average at the bottom. This can be ordered from top to bottom by clicking where it says ‘Average’ as the column header, allowing for easy benchmarking.
- The difference between the student in that row’s average, and the class average. Again, this can be ordered from top to bottom to ensure those students well above or below their peers across multiple subjects can be easily identified.
By using the OPTIONS & FILTERS button, you can also:
- Aggregate by CLASS to compare averages across multiple classes in your school and spot discrepancies between classrooms.
- Aggregate by SCHOOL to look at the data for all classes combined, or if you’re a MAT, compare data across your schools.
Comparing with other schools
As with Global assessments in Attainment Analysis, you can also pull in and compare the anonymised data of other participating schools with Subject Analysis too.
First, tick the ‘Other schools’ box from the ‘At’ selector:
Next, using OPTIONS & FILTERS you can aggregate by ‘All schools’, which gives you one row of data which is your organisation combined, and another which is all other schools which submitted data combined:
This then allows you to compare your averages per subject in your chosen gradeset against the ‘global’ averages.
Chart view
Subject Analysis can also be viewed as a chart rather than a table, by selecting the chart icon in the bottom-left corner:
Student scores are represented by circles on the chart, with each subject showing on a different line, allowing for a visual representation of the spread of the chosen gradeset across different subjects. the grey vertical lines show you the average score.
If more than one student achieved the same score, the circle will be darker - the key on the left hand side of the chart tells you how many students belong to each circle by colour.
If you hover on any circle, you'll see the student name(s) and as summary of the same data you see in the table view, such as subject average and difference from the class/school average:
Underneath the chart you can select a student, class or school (depending on your grouping in Options & Filters) to highlight, which will colour purple the circles relating to their scores.
You can choose to turn on labels in this section, which will show the scores at the average lines and the highlighted scores if that's turned on.
If you are a MAT, you can group the data by School and have the aggregated data of each school in the Trust represented as a circle in the chart across all subjects, allowing for a speedy way to spot gaps between schools across multiple subjects.