Understanding Automatically Generated Best Fit Levels

A school's leadership team chooses the way teachers enter school expectation data. This can either be the manual setting of progress levels through moving a slider or automatically generated Best fit levels. They also customise how the school's goals are levelled, the milestones for when data is recorded and the expected level for each milestone.

This article has been written to assist teachers with understanding how an automatically generated Best fit level is generated by Hero.

HOW AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED BEST FIT LEVELS ARE CALCULATED

Best fit levels are designed to give teachers an indication of the level a student is working on based on a calculation. Best fit levels are only a guide and require teachers to verify and amend these based on their knowledge of the student.

Hero Terms	Also known as...	Description
Goal Category	Level of Goals Curriculum Levels Goal Level Radial Dial	These are the organisational structure for sets of goals, often these will use the language of “Levels”. The dials on the Current Report page are indicative of Goal Categories. Goal Categories are NOT used to calculate best fits.
Goal Sub-category		These are the organisational structure within a Goal Category. Goal Sub Categories are NOT used to calculate best fits.
Progress Levels	Sub-levels	These are curriculum levels set by your school. Levels are associated with the school’s expectations and are LINKED to a Goal Category.

At the customisation of your Hero software, your school leadership team set up the number of progress shifts (levels) in the Milestones / Expectations area.

Each of these progress levels is correlated to a level of goals e.g.

The number of goals in each level of goals is then divided equally by the number of correlated progress levels with the exception of the final levels should rounding occur. e.g.

As goals are clicked, the progress levels become complete according to the number of goals associated with them. It does not matter which goals within the Goal Category are clicked first. 

Eg. If Level 2 goals are structured in two subcategories (Early L2 and End L2), clicking two goals in subcategory 1 and two in subcategory 2 will still be four goals going towards a best fit at Early Level 2.

The calculation

The Best fit calculation is initiated by changing a goal. At the time of clicking a goal, Hero runs a check to see if it is able to calculate a Best fit. 

1. Hero looks for the highest complete progress level for the subject. If there are no complete levels then the below process will start at the lowest progress level in this subject.
2. It then looks for the next progress level above this with over half of the goals set,  either current (buff) or complete (green). If this is found, it will be the calculated best fit level.
3. If this is not found, Hero looks for the next progress level above this with any goals set, either current (buff) or complete (green). If this is found, it will be the calculated best fit level.
4. If it is not found then the highest complete progress level will be the best fit.
5. Hero then checks if there is already a progress level set for the current milestone that is the same or higher. If this is found, no new level is set and no changelog will be generated
6. If the new best fit is the highest level for the current milestone, then this is set as the best fit level, a point is plotted in the progress chart and the changelog is updated.

Click here for a printable PDF of this flowchart

Note: An update was made to how best fits are calculated and this was made on September 17th 2020. This tweaked the calculation to prevent students from being awarded a lower progress level if they had some missing goals below their current level. Progress levels set before this date may be different to expected based on the above process.

For help understanding why a specific best fit level was set for a student, the Changelog is able to be viewed. See the help article Understanding How a Progress Level was Generated (Progress Level Changelogs)