How do I comment on student results?

Commenting on student results is a great way to give feedback to parents and students. You can congratulate your students when they do well, provide context around a score, or give direction to students who can improve. In Schoolrunner, you can leave comments for individual students on assessment results or overall standard scores.

Important things to remember:

• commenting on results is optional
• comments are for individual results; i.e. different students can have different comments on the same assessment or standard
• comments on results are not for internal purposes – they'll be visible externally on slips, progress reports, and (possibly) report cards
• comments represent one-way communication – even though parents and students may view them in the portal, they can't respond

Leaving Comments

The easiest way to leave feedback is in Gradebook. There, you'll notice a small comment icon when you:

• open an assessment to edit its scores
• open an overall standard to edit its scores (commenting on assessment-level standard results isn't an option)

Click the icon to show the comment field, and click it again to hide it. Once you enter a comment, you'll have to hit the green disk icon to save it, just like when editing scores normally. You can enter comments for one student, a selection of students, or all students. If you want to leave the same comment for all students, use the "Fill Down" option to copy what you've written to the students below.

Pro Tip: When editing assessment scores, standard scores, or comments, use your tab key to quickly move from field to field!

You can also comment on assessment results on the full assessment page, but you won't have the option to quickly move from one student to the next. If you want to choose a student for whom to leave a comment, look for the pencil icon next to a student's results. When you click this, you'll be able to leave a comment for that particular student. Using this method, it's only possible to comment on assessment results.

To comment on standard scores outside of Gradebook, you can click the pencil icon next to the standard anywhere you can pull up the progress reports view (on the Progress Reports page or when hovering/clicking on a student course grade).

Comment Visibility

When a comment is left on a student result, you'll see a speech bubble icon in Gradebook (for both assessment and standard comments) and on the assessment page (assessment comments only). Click/hover on the icon to view the comment.

Outside of Gradebook and the assessment page, comments are visible in three places:

• Slips – your slips may be configured to display recent assessments. If so, comments left on assessments will show up on slips in the website, on printed slips, and in the parent/student portal. Comments on standards are not visible on slips.
• Progress Reports – both assessment and standard results are visible on progress reports, but not at the same time. Toggling between the "Grading System" options will determine which comments are shown. Make sure that the "Columns" menu has "Comments" selected so that comments show in progress report tables. Selections in the "Columns" menu are defaulted from your school's settings, but anyone can tweak progress report columns as they see fit. Visibility and functionality on progress reports is the same for teachers as for parents and students.
• Report Cards – if an an assessment is highlighted on report cards, any comments on assessment results will also show up. If report cards are configured to show standards, then comments on standard results will show up as well.

Slips view

Progress Report view

There are two additional, advanced ways for teachers to view comments. The "Download CSV" option in Gradebook produces a spreadsheet that includes student results and comments based on your current view. The second method to access comments is via the Schoolrunner API. Both the /assessment-students endpoint and the /objective-grades endpoint return comments.

To remove result comments, navigate to the comment, clear it out, and save. You can also remove comments en masse in Gradebook: open up an assessment or a standard, clear out the first comment, and then fill down.

Pro Tip: If you're looking to leave a comment on an assessment itself and not the student results on that assessment, you can do this on the assessment page. Scroll down to the "Comments" section at the bottom. Comments left here are internal (not shown on anything that parents or students see), and there can be multiple comments on a single assessment. Also, you're notified within Schoolrunner when someone else comments on  your assessment.