Using Your Data to Share with Families
The Family Information Report is located in the Student-Level Reports section. As a reminder, you can reach your reports from the VKRP landing page in your PALS account.
Once on your VKRP landing page look under the View Results column on the right side of your screen. You will see Classroom Level Reports and then Student-Level Reports (#5 below).
For a quick visual overview of the Family Information Report, check out the VKRP Reports & Resources Overview 2017 video on YouTube (14:52 -15:55).
Family Information Report Overview
Feedback from teachers across the Commonwealth helped us create a concise report. The report is designed to help you walk families through how their child performed across readiness domains and what the scores mean. Once on the report you can link to family resources (location circled below) that you can download and share with families in the areas of math, self-regulation, and social skills. These resources include fun and easy ways to support their child’s development in these domains at home! As you likely know, our PALS colleagues have a Parent website with many literacy resources. The VKRP family reports and resources are also available in Spanish (bottom left of the Family Information Report). Teachers currently using the VKRP system have shared that they use the reports as helpful guides during parent-teacher conferences.
Preparing to Share
Prior to sharing a child’s scores with his/her family, you will want to dig a little deeper for specific information regarding a student’s skills.
MATH: The math score shared on the Family Information Report is a student’s overall math score. You can access a student’s scores in the subdomains of math (numeracy, geometry, etc.) by visiting either the classroom-level subdomain math reports or the student-level math report (revisit the VKRP blog on Accessing Your Reports here). You’ll be able to narrow the math resources you share with a family to the ones that align with the specific skill(s) a student is needing to develop.
CBRS: Keep in mind that your observations were at the beginning of the school year and the CBRS data recorded is a snapshot of your students’ skills during that time frame. You will want to do some follow-up observations (as described in this VKRP Resource) to be able to facilitate a more detailed conversation with the family about where their student needs support, especially for those who are not developmentally where you expect them to be in their self-regulation or social skills (not meeting the benchmark) at entry. We acknowledge that discussing these social emotional skills can be challenging. You may find it useful to help parents understand that these skills are still developing at this age and early supports are incredibly effective in facilitating the development of these skills! In other words, we are not placing a label of “bad” or “good” on a student, rather we want to highlight that kindergarten is an important time to work on these skills to build a strong foundation for students’ future academic and social-emotional skills.
If you need to send the report home, we recommend providing details about student skills as outlined above in writing, in addition to the family resources. It may be helpful to use a format and template like this one (Making a Plan for Using the Family Report) to facilitate your organization of the information.
We hope this closer look at the Family Information Report has been helpful. As always, if you have questions, VKRP provides support via the online chat feature when you are in the system, via email vkrp@virginia.edu, and via toll free 866-301-8278 ext. 1.
