Prerequisites
- To set up Support Tiers, you must be a System Admin. To check or change your role, see How to Change Your Role, or contact us at support@withwayfinder.com to request these permissions.
- Your beginning-of-year summative assessment window must have passed.
About Support Tiers
Support Tiers is an opt-in feature that helps you better understand and respond to student needs. Once set up, it automatically calculates cutoff scores, color-codes student results, and generates insights for summative assessment results based on your chosen tier structure. These visuals and insights are available to system administrators, school administrators, and counselors, with the option to include teachers.
Support Tiers analyzes Waypoints data and calculates percentile-based cutoffs based on the System Administrator’s settings. If you’re using Wayfinder across multiple schools in a district, percentiles reflect district-wide data. The percentiles are based on your school’s student data if you're using it in a single school. Based on the percentiles you set for each tier, the system will organize all local scores into those percentile ranges. Each student’s score is compared to their grade band’s complete data set—either school or district—so their tier reflects where they fall relative to their peers.
To read more about support tier permissions, scroll down to the section "Support Tier Data by User Type."
How to Set Up Support Tiers
- Log in to your account as a System Admin
- Click on "Waypoints" on the left-hand side
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Under "Assessment Name," click on "Summative"
A prerequisite to setting up Support Tiers it that Beginning of Year results are present - Click on the tab "Support Tiers"
- Click on "Set Up Support Tiers"
- Fill in the Percentile Range, Color, and Support Tier Name for each row.
- Percentile Ranges: Select the percentage of students that should fall into each Support Tier. You may also use the arrows on the Support Tier visual to set percentile ranges. Student skill averages are rounded to the nearest tenth before being compared with tier ranges to determine their support tier.
- Color: Pick a color for each support tier. Do not repeat colors across support tiers.
- Support Tier Name: Give each tier a distinct name that is easily recognized across the teams that will be working with this data.
- Show Support Tiers with Teachers: Check the "Share Support Tiers with Teachers" if you would like for teachers to see which of their students fall into your chosen support tiers. By default, Principals, School Admin, and Counselors will see support tier data for students they have access to. For visuals of what each user type sees, scroll down to the section "Support Tier Data by User Type."
- When you are done, click on "Submit."
- The next screen displays the cutoff scores for each Support Tier across all Core Skills. If your district includes multiple grade bands, use the grade-level dropdown to view the cutoffs for each band. To edit your percentile ranges at any time, click on the "Edit Percentiles" button.
Support Tier Data by User Type
Change Over Time Tab
User Types
- System Admin
- Principal + School Admin
Description
After you have administered at least two summative assessments, you may review change over time results. To drill down to a specific assessment, use the "Assessment" dropdown. To view only certain core skills, use the "Core Skills" dropdown. Each bar shows the distribution of students in each support tier. If you have administered a beginning-of-year, mid-year, and end-of-year assessment, you will see one bar for each assessment.
Use the table to view the percentage and number of students that fall into each support tier.
Students Tab
User Types
- System Admin: To use the Students Tab as a System Adminstrator, first select a school in the "Schools" filter on the left-hand side.
- Principal + School Admin
- Teachers: Teachers never see the "Student Trends" table. If the "Support Tiers for Teachers" box is checked by the System Administrator during setup, they will see color-coding and insights for their students.
Description
The Student Trends graph shows data from the most recent completed assessment. Each bar shows the distribution of students in each support tier for that assessment. Each column represents Wayfinder's 6 Core Skills. To view the graph in tabular format, click on the graph/table toggle at the top right.
Click on the dropdown at the top right of the graph to select the assessment you would like to view.
Click on any segment of each bar graph to filter the list of students below it.
The Students List shows a list of all students. Use the "Support Tier" filter at the top right to filter down to students that have at least one core skill score in that support tier.
Hover over icons in the "Insights" column for insights on each student based on the number of core skill scores in each support tier.
How to Use Support Tiers
For more information on how to use Support Tiers, please watch our Wayfinder Academy videos: