Custom Reports is a very useful tool for data analysis. Most data analysis occurs within teams, or amongst multiple people. Additionally, due to varying cut scores throughout states and subjects, these reports can help with their ability to customize cut scores. Here are the problems that I see that could potentially help custom reports to be easier to work with and more functional. The first problem is that you cannot share custom reports "live;" you must print them. As part of an instruction team in a school, I must rerun reports for teachers and admin as straggling students make-up the assessment. The second problem is that when building custom reports, you must edit/customize each assessment added. Most of the time I am adding the same assessment 10+ times, customizing cut scores to our state/district cut scores on each one to the same custom cut scores. This process is tedious and time consuming.
The solution to problem one would be the ability to share a custom report with other admin, and ideally, teachers as well. If you are familiar with Google Docs, I think the ability to share a view only and an editor permission custom report would be ideal. That way instructional teams can collaborate on custom reports instead of having to each build our own, and teachers can have access to "live" reports throughout the benchmark windows.
The solution to second problem would be the ability to add either a formative/benchmark assessment to a custom report, edit/customize however the builder would like, and THEN be able to duplicate the customized assessment WITHIN the custom report (vs adding the original assessment multiple times and editing each one individually). As stated above, the majority of the time I am building custom reports due to changing cut scores to allow teachers to gage future standardized testing performance. So being able to add the Math 6 Benchmark, change the cut scores, and then duplicating that, would save time in creating these reports.
