The Burnaby school district is piloting a homegrown online tool to track the behaviour of students on the autism spectrum.
Designed to help teachers decide what’s working for the students and what’s not, the program makes gathering and analyzing information about student behaviour easier.
“We’re already doing an amazing job of collecting a lot of behaviour data on students daily and weekly, but what’s happening is it’s sitting in binders and it’s sitting in notebooks,” Nadine Trottier, the district’s behaviour analyst behind the project, told trustees at a recent school board meeting.
Even when educators get the information into graphs and reports, Trottier said, it usually isn’t until the end of a week, two weeks or a month.
“Really when they take that picture and they’re making their data-based decisions, it can be based on data that’s actually a week old, two weeks old, a month old,” she said.
Enter Behaviour Profiles – an online system to store and graph student behaviour data.
Taking a little time at the end of each day, Trottier said, teachers and education assistants can now log on to the district website, open a student’s account and record the information they want to track, like how many times the student kicked or punched someone during the day or how long the problem behaviour lasted.
Using a graphing tab, all the latest information can then be plotted instantly on a variety of graphs to show trends and patterns.
“The feedback we’re getting is really positive,” said Trottier, who worked with programmers Costa Dedegikas and Kostas Poulakidas at the SFU New Media lab for two years to develop the program. “People are finding that it’s a lot more user-friendly. There’s decreased time spent entering the data, graphing the data. The instant graphs, they said, have been wonderful to go into team meetings and be able to show information that’s from the day before and even the day of.”
The district started piloting the program, which cost about $10,800 to develop, on the first day of school, and there are now 16 students from five schools on the system.
Others are lining up to get on board, but Trottier said the Behaviour Profiles team is still working out some bugs in the system.
School board vice-chair Harman Pandher asked Trottier about security and privacy safeguards and how long the student data would be stored.
Trottier said all the information would be kept on the district’s servers and the program was equipped with an automatic logout feature.
She said the data would be kept indefinitely.
Assistant superintendent Roberto Bombelli said the information would be kept like any other student record and could be printed off for students who left the district and then deleted.
