Understanding Criteria Selection

How Criteria Work

Criteria are the building blocks of a comment. On the generate page they are called focus areas: short statements of what a student can do, written for each year level from Foundation to Year 6 and aligned to the Australian Curriculum (Version 9.0). You tick the ones that describe the student, and ReportRocket writes them into a comment.

How They Are Organised

• Subjects run across the top of the generate page as pills: English, Mathematics, General, HASS, Science, The Arts, PE and more. Each pill shows how many focus areas you have ticked in that subject.
• Categories sit inside each subject, for example Language, Literacy and Literature in English, or Number, Measurement and Statistics in Mathematics. Click a category to open it.
• Focus areas are the statements inside a category that you tick.

The class's year level decides which focus areas appear. Your school may have added its own subjects or switched some off, so your list may differ from these examples. On larger subjects, a Search criteria box finds a focus area by its wording.

Performance Levels

Curriculum subjects such as English, Mathematics, Science, HASS, The Arts and PE show three buttons above their focus areas:

The level decides how each focus area is worded. Here is one Year 3 Measurement focus area at each level:

• High: "Independently chooses appropriate metric units and makes accurate estimates using everyday items as benchmarks."
• Medium: "Shows understanding of metric units and is learning to make estimates using familiar objects."
• Low: "Is beginning to identify metric units on packaging and explore making comparisons with support."

Choose the level first, then tick. Each tick keeps the level it was made at, so one comment can mix levels: choose High while you tick English, then Low while you tick Mathematics, for a student who is ahead in reading and still building their number skills. A new comment starts on Medium.

Other Kinds of Focus Areas

Some subjects don't use High, Medium and Low:

• Strengths and weaknesses. General holds Traits, Behaviour and Attitude, Relationships and Work Habits. Each category has a Strengths column and a Weaknesses column. The words you pick under Traits open the comment, so it is worth starting there.
• Semester or year. Future Focus holds the closing sentence. The Semester and Year buttons switch between closers for the end of a semester and the end of the year.
• Statements with no level. Personal Development, Learning Behaviours and STEM list statements you tick as they are.

How Many to Tick

A few well-chosen focus areas give a better comment than a long list, because everything has to fit inside your school's character range. Before you tick anything, the page suggests a number, for example "Pick around 4–6 focus areas for a 600–850 character comment". As you tick, the Selected focus areas badge shows how the length is shaping up and tells you when more are ticked than will fit. Click it to see your ticks across every subject and remove any you no longer want.

Your note under Make it personal counts towards the length too, so a detailed note needs fewer focus areas.

Customising Criteria

School administrators and individual teachers can customise criteria in Settings. See Customising curriculum settings for details.

Next Steps

• Generate your first report
• Customising curriculum settings