Students & Families Adult Education Adult & Community Learning Services
Adult and Community Learning Services

SMARTT Updates

By Donna Cornellier
dcornellier@doe.mass.edu
June 13, 2008

1. SMARTT Users Group - Volunteers Wanted
   ACLS is are looking for a group of volunteers who can test new SMARTT features and provide guidance during the design phase, when sections are redesigned or new sections are developed. The goal is to have a better structured testing phase, in order to get better feedback from SMARTT users. ACLS would like to identify a pool of about 15 to 20 "power users" made up of a mix of staff types --- part-time data entry, full-time data entry, directors, etc. Knowing that everyone is busy, no one would be expected to be available all the time; a pool of 15-20 volunteers would ensure that at any give time, ten users would be able to respond to a request for feedback. If you are willing to be part of this new SMARTT Users Group, please e-mail Donna Cornellier at dcornellier@doe.mass.edu

2. Why it is Important for a Student Goals to be Recorded and Revisited Regularly
   As you may know, we are not allowed to include in the Federal Report the achievement of any goal, if that goal was not set by the student prior to achieving it. ACLS has been monitoring the proportion of GEDs earned that we are and are not able to report, by data matching students enrolled in SMARTT with the GED database maintained by Oklahoma Scoring Service. The last GED data match was completed on May 29. Of the two hundred and twenty five (225) GED recipients who had class attendance entered in SMARTT in FY08, only 194 of them, or 86%, had set "Obtain GED" as a goal. Unfortunately, 31 individuals, or 14% of our students who earned the GED, had not set this goal, and therefore can not be included in the Federal Report. In order to ensure that student accomplishments are credited, it is important to meet with students on a regular basis to make sure goals are set, new goals are identified, and the dates set are entered into the system. Thank you for your continued efforts in this area.

3. Class Screen Enhancements as a Result of User Feedback
   ACLS has received some feedback from users on the new class screens; all of the issues are resolvable with refinements to the screens. Hopefully, with the new SMARTT Users Group in place (see item #1, above), ACLS will get this important feedback prior to releasing any changes on new features. We've had great success with feedback we received for the new Distance Learning screens.

   These changes have been made to the class attendance screen:

   1. Option to edit all student attendance at once.
   2. Tab sequence will be vertical for each month.
   3. When clicking on a single month to edit, the cursor appears on the current month of the year. When selecting the "edit all" feature, then cursor appears on the current month of the year of the first student in the attendance list.
   4. Blanking out attendance hours for a month will, in effect, clear out the attendance for that month rather than display zero hours.
   5. Exited students (marked with an "X") will be moved to the bottom of the attendance list when selecting status as "All" in the drop down list.

   Enhancements to the class slots screen:

   1. Added unfunded slots to the slot summary section.
   2. Display the information for unfunded slots in the class slot details section

   Enhancement to the class enrollment screen:

   1. Added a new section called "Slot Summary" that shows the total funded and unfunded slots.



4. Federal Reports Released
   The site level Federal Report Tables 1 - 4B are now available in Cognos. The Business Rules for Federal Reports for FY08 are now posted on our ACLS website.

   https://smartt.doemass.org/sids

   Table 1:	Participants by Entering Educational Functioning Level, Ethnicity, and Gender
   Table 2:	Participants by Age, Ethnicity, and Gender
   Table 3:	Participants by Program Type and Age
   Table 4:	Educational Gains and Attendance by Educational Functioning Level
   Table 4B:	Educational Gains and Attendance by Educational Functioning Level (includes only students who received pre and post tests)

   
   

5. SMARTT TRAINING SCHEDULE
   The updated training schedule is now posted. Note that the next SMARTT New User Training is scheduled for July 9th at Quinsigamond CC, City Square downtown campus from 9:30-3:30. To register for this training and other trainings, please go to http://calendar.sabes.org/ and click on your region, or, contact the regional offices directly.

   In order to ensure that the program has at all times the required two staff with updated training in SMARTT and Cognos, program directors are requested to have the appropriate staff attend the scheduled upcoming trainings, and are encouraged to notify the SABES regional office as soon as possible with future training needs, so that SABES can schedule appropriate trainings. For contact information, see http://www.sabes.org/staff.htm.