BY CHRIS BROOKE

For parents who want to break down a student’s grasp of classroom concepts beyond the regular A, B, C grading scale, Eminence Independent Schools has an app for that.

Educators call the program CoCoA, which is short for the Competency Collector App, according to Larry Jesse, Eminence’s director of technology. It will allow teachers to record a student’s progress and share that information with parents. The need for the app arose as schools trend toward “standards based grading,” an effort to provide granular evaluations on concepts beyond the classwork as

a whole, Jesse explained.

“For instance, an elementary math class may not just give a grade on the report card that says a student has a B in the class, but it will be broken down by the content actually learned in the class,” he said. “Can the student add two-digit numbers? Yes. Can the student count by 10s to 100? Yes. Can the student manipulate negative numbers? Maybe not yet.”

The district had an online learner management system that did a pretty good job of tracking students’ progress, but Jesse said EIS officials wanted something more interactive. So they created CoCoA.

Using the app will allow teachers to quickly tick off the standards a student masters, Jesse said.

“As student work comes in that touches on a specific standard, the teacher can insert that work into CoCoA with an evaluative statement,” he explained. “So, for instance, a student may

stand up in class and give a speech as if they were Abraham Lincoln. A hypothetical standard exists that a student should understand the events that led to the U.S. Civil War.”

Teachers could scan and upload term papers and quizzes that show students have met standards, he said. Likewise, the teacher could, with an iPad, record a student’s successful presentation on the 16th president of the United States and save it for the record, too.

The app will serve as a portal, giving parents access to a database of their student’s work, Jesse said. This is the really exciting part.

“The goal is to empower parents with direct access to the individual standards and allow them to see as their student progresses throughout the year, what standards have been met, or are still being worked on,” Jesse said.

“By seeing the specific piece of student work that went into creating a grade, we think parents will have a better understanding of how and what their students are learning.”

Educators, by the way, will host that database locally and make it accessible with individual usernames and passwords for security sake, Jesse said. CoCoA provides teachers another way to approach their student evaluations — one, Jesse hopes, could be even more efficient than traditional methods.

It’s always been the teacher’s responsibility to read term papers for the quality and depth of a student’s answers and check a multiple-choice test against an answer key, he pointed out.

“We actually hope that this can be a quicker method of passing this feedback along to the student,” he said. “Once a work has been observed by the teacher, the process of capturing and giving it a ‘meet’ or ‘doesn’t meet’ score can be completed in just a few seconds, plus any specific feedback the teacher wishes to provide.”

The new app will require training for teachers to use, Jesse said. Making an observation, in some cases, may only take four or so taps on their device screens. They’ll also have the option of providing as detailed an evaluation as they would like.

“Since the app was designed in-house, we are extremely familiar with its function, and feel confident staff will catch on quickly,” Jesse said. “We have conferred with several teachers on the flow of the app, and feel like it is pretty intuitive.”

From the record of these evaluations in the database, a student could end up with a history of his or her time at Eminence schools.

“One of the exciting goals of CoCoA is the ability to give our kindergarten through 12 students a complete portfolio of their career at Eminence,” Jesse said. “A graduating senior could look back

at a video of themselves in the first grade, where they were discussing the life cycle of a tadpole.”

As such, the information-technology department has planned for a huge amount of storage, he said.

“Depending on what observations are being made — obviously, a PDF of a document will take up less storage than a 20-minute high definition video — we have estimated storage in the 10 to 12 terabyte range,” Jesse said.

Excitement about the possibilities created by CoCoA goes all the way to the top of Eminence schools.

“We are extremely excited about the app and its potential,” Superintendent Buddy Berry said. “We feel this will certainly help streamline teachers’ efforts in standards based grading. We also feel parents will love the real time data it will provide them in terms of what competencies their child has met and what was the evidence that was collected to determine it.”

This could come in handy for other school systems, too, and Eminence is willing to share.

“We have already had calls from multiple states asking if they could pilot the app,” Berry said. “We’re currently working the bugs out of the app with a hope to have it ready for a full-release sometime this year. This is an unprecedented step forward in competency-based education.”