Top 10 Questions About the Student Success System

Below are the 10 most common questions about Panorama Student Success for Iowa.

1. Why aren't there any assessment scores on the overview page.

The overview page represents a kind of early warning display. Effective in 2022-23 school year, the academics indicator bar is fed by available academic grade data from the district's student information system. The individual student’s grade and color coding are based on whatever is the “worst” result across all of the available grade data.

• See: Using the Overview Report for Schools, Districts, and AEAs
  
• See: Using the Overview report for Student Level Decisions

1. Where do I find a recording and slides for a webinar I missed?

We do our best to record webinars and post the recordings as soon as possible after the webinar. It may take a few days. We also post support materials.
See: Webinars

2. Why can’t I find math data? Where is it shown in the system?

Math data is available on the K-6th Healthy Indicator, Mathematics and on Individual Student Profile pages.
See: FAQs: Math in Student Success

3. How do I start an intervention? Do interventions come over from FAST?

The official location for tracking and reporting interventions for ELI is in the Student Success system. There is no mechanism for interventions created in FAST to transfer over to Student Success.
See: How to Create an Intervention

4. I can’t assign a teacher as a champion.

   The champion and team list are built off of the users the system knows exist and are permitted to see the student. People will not show up on the list unless they have accessed the Student Success system at least once prior to the current day.
   See: FAQ: Staff are missing from the list (champion, intervention team or group sharing), how do I add them?

5. How do I give someone access to Student Success?

   Security for district staff is managed via assignments in the district’s student information system that connect with the Iowa Education Portal, matching the person’s email address between their portal account and the SIS data.
   See: Quick Start: Access to Student Success and Fastbridge for LEA Users

   Security management for AEA staff is handled slightly differently:
   See: Quick Start: AEA Access to Student Success and Fastbridge

6. How do I hide (or mark) students who didn’t test so I don’t get a ding?

   We see quite a few questions that have this as an underlying driver. There is an unfounded fear of consequences that we would like to have help dispelling. First, and to be perfectly clear: There is no ding. End of message. The indicators are not part of ESSA identification. Read the linked article for a rationale to put the issue into context and redirect the angst to more productive motivators.
   See: Don't fear the "ding"... How to think about Healthy Indicators

7. The literacy status isn’t right. He’s red red green. Shouldn’t that be Adequately Progressing?

   We are having difficulty shaking the first logic set we trained people on seven years ago, even though it hasn’t been used for the last five years. We don’t use color coding for literacy status, and the logic used for calculating the literacy status is based on the last literacy status designation and the current benchmark screening result.
   See: What is a literacy status and how is it determined?

8. The reports aren’t showing our PM right. How do we look for a student we missed monitoring?

   The healthy indicator reports for PM are intended as a tool for spotting potential problem areas. There are nuances to the way they summarize data. Do not think of them as precision tools, and do not obsess on their accuracy. Look for patterns and then go to the student views for more detailed exploration.
   See: Weekly Progress Monitoring Percentage Appears Low

9. MTSS and ELI

   There are limitations to the way ELI requirements are supported in Student Success. This is because the system was built to support MTSS first, and also to help with ELI, rather than the other way around. This is why you will see healthy indicator displays that don’t exactly match up with ELI requirements. 

   For example, the healthy indicator for progress monitoring is based on the number of students below benchmark, rather than literacy status. Another example is that students who are screened using alternate assessment or another approved measure (not the district default) have been screened, but don’t display in the percent screened. It’s simply a limit of the programming and not a commentary on quality MTSS practices.

10. I can’t see a student in the system. The students don’t match between Fastbridge and Panorama. 

    Fastbridge loads students into the system based on their schedule and enrollment, while Student Success loads them based on their school enrollment record (although classroom user views are still controlled by schedule). This can lead to slight differences between the systems.

    There are also problems in FAST and Student Success created by students enrolled simultaneously at two locations due to remote learning. Neither system was built to handle two active enrollments. Things work, but strangeness happens. This results in complex interactions between systems that are difficult or impossible to fix.

    Yes, we know there are 11 in this list. It’s like Nigel’s amp in Spinal Tap. Our top ten list goes the extra little bit. Just for you.