CanDo helps you manage what is often called outcome-based assessment. It is also called competency, skill or standard based assessment. The basic principal is the same. You have a body of outcomes, which we will generically call “skills” in the rest of this document, and you track student achievement of those skills directly, rather than through assigning points to activities or participation and assigning an aggregate grade.
Getting to a specific example as quickly as possible will help.
Below is a mindmap showing the hierarchy of “Hands-On Math” skills covered in the Building to Teach program.
Each leaf in this tree is a skill, for example:
- Understand Place Value Chart and the necessity to operate in “like units.”
- Round numbers. Understands relationship of this skill to “tolerance” in building process.
- Add and subtract, whole numbers.
These are grouped in branches called skillsets, e.g.:
- Basic Mathematics
- Fractions and Mixed Numbers
- Decimals
The trunk of the tree is a node representing the whole Hands-On Math course.
CanDo requires skills be organized into skillsets. The organizing nodes above this level are optional.
Logged in as “manager,” go to School and click Skills from the sidebar:
We’ll start with a document representing the Hands-On Math course. Click Add: Document:
Give the document a title and an optional description. Under Layer Hierarchy, in this case, as defined above, we only have Skillsets and Skills as defined above. If we wanted to add additional layers to group the skillsets, we would click on Add layer and name each layer in the hierarchy. We could also rename “SkillSet” and “Skill.”
Click Submit:
Now, to add a SkillSet we click Add: SkillSet:
The label attribute is important because you need a short representation of the SkillSet that will appear within a tab in the CanDo gradebook.
Similarly, to add a Skill to the SkillSet, click Add: Skill from the SkillSet view: