Grade Spans

Relevant definitions

A grade span covers multiple years of school and can be defined by the administrator.  A plan can not exceed a grade span.  The purpose of defining grade spans is to help set academic goals and gates. 

Student Terms.  There is one term record for every term the school operates.  A student term record contains student-specific information about how the student performed academically in the term, such as the student's grade point average for that term. All the classes a student takes (enrollment records) are linked to the student term.  A student has a term record created for each term they are in attendance. 

Schools refer to legal definitions in a jurisdiction of various grade levels. In the US this is Elementary School, grades K through 5, Middle School grades 6 through 8, and high school, grades 9 through 12.

Grade Span Table

The grade span is used as a planning horizon for students.  PEMS aims to automate enrollment in courses by assignment of a Program of Study.  A program of study can not exceed the student's grade span.

Based on the student's grade level, the student is associated with only one grade span. Based on the grade span, PEMS creates past, current, and future school terms.  PEMS does not create all future school terms for the student until graduation, but only until the end of the assigned grade span.  These future term records are required in order to create future enrollment records for future classes.

Grade spans should not run over the end of a 'school' If an elementary school is defined as K6, and middle school defined as 6-8, then a grade span should not run from grade 4 to grade 6.  Grade spans are subgroups of schools, or may be the exact same length of time as a school.

Fields

Grade Span name - any name the user would like to call the grade span.  

Start grade and end grade are entered by the user.  Based on the term label records, the user will specific the number of terms in the span.  Only required terms should be entered in this field as other parts of the PEMS expects this value to exclude optional terms.

The school is selected as a drop down menu based on the records defined in the school table.  There can be multiple grade spans per school, but there can only be one school per grade span.