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Getting started: understanding the API object types

Samantha L Cook
Updated

To help you understand and make the most of your data, below is an overview of the Object Types that you can query using the Data API:

Your organization structure in Boost

Groups

The Groups endpoint reflects the structure of your school district in Boost. Depending on your specific implementation, each 'group' in Boost may refer to individual school sites, or perhaps staff grouped by their role (e.g. 'Leadership', or 'Support Staff'). An easy way to see this in-app is checking out the group-switcher, which also illustrates any nesting of regions, schools, and sub-groups (indicated by the Group's parent_id).

Users 

The Users endpoint returns all staff members who have ever been registered with an account in Boost, past and present. Additional data presented include the User's group_access to any of their current Groups in Boost, and any information attributed to them in the Staff Manager, including their tags, grades and targets.

Time Periods

Time Periods are used in Boost to group your data in a more useful way. By default, these usually run parallel to your school years, although custom-set time periods may sometimes be set with your school district, to cover shorter time periods such as summer schools. The time periods here correspond with those within the date-range switcher in-app.

Your evaluation materials in Boost

Frameworks

The Frameworks endpoint returns all past and current evaluation/coaching frameworks (or rubrics) that are used by your school district. This contains information about the associated rating scale, and the hard-coded rating bounds for scores applied against this framework.

Framework

The Framework enables you to dig deeper into a single, specified framework, or rubric, used at your district. The information here includes a full list of all competencies and their unique competency id, against which evidence, ratings, and feedback is applied to your Users within forms. To see your frameworks in-app, head to the Resources area.

Templates

The Templates endpoint returns all templates, past and present, used at your school district. Templates are the master versions of the digital documents (i.e. Forms) your school staff fill in. A single template might have a single or multiple form_types, (e.g. a 'Classroom Observation' template, might have both a 'Formal' and 'Informal' form type).

Templates might also be bundled together, forming a sort of Super-Template, known as a 'Cycle' (i.e. is_cycle). A Cycle is a collection of non-Cycle Templates. For example, a Formal Observation Cycle may include a Pre-Observation, Formal Evaluation, and Post-Observation, each of which are separate Templates collected into one bundle.

Goal Types

Goal Types are similar to Templates as master copies of a type of a digital document: Goals. These comprise a separate object type to Templates because they behave differently in-app (i.e. they are a long-term activity requiring updates from Users throughout the school year, as opposed to Forms that usually describe single events within the school year). 

Your data in Boost

Forms

The Forms endpoint pulls the high-level meta data about your forms in Boost, including the date on the form, and the topic_ids and author_ids (who the form is about, and who edited the form respectively). These IDs correspond with your staff members' id returned via the Users endpoint.

Each form will have a defined status, either (1) 'scheduled', when the form has not yet been started, (2) 'in_progress' when the form is still being edited, or (3) 'complete' when your form has been finalized by your staff and its Scores roll up into your in-app reports. Finally, the topic_released_on is a date-time field indicating if/when the form's contents have been shared with the staff member/s the form is about (i.e. topic_ids).

Form Results

The Form Results endpoint allows you to dig into the data about specific forms in your school implementation. As well as a specific form's meta data (e.g. the topics, authors, and date), this endpoint returns all the answers recorded within that form, grouped under statements if the form is created in our scripting tool (Sketch) or answers, if the form is created in our Q&A-type tool.

Sketch forms:

  • evidence the tagged text from the notes made in the Sketch editor
  • feedback any comments are feedback applied to the evidence
  • rating the number or the rating_label assigned to this piece of feedback
  • standards the area of the 'framework' this feedback has been applied to
  • steps for any 'tasks' that have been assigned specifically to this feedback
  • attachments if external resources have been attached to the feedback

Q&A forms:

  • label the question field text
  • answer the answer recorded for each question
  • comment for any additional comments applied to the answer

Scores

The Scores endpoint returns all the scores assigned to staff within forms, as rated against your framework (or, rubric). You can set a start_date and end_date to focus in on a specific time period as you move through the school year. The originating form_id of the score is detailed, together with the competency_ids reflecting the area of the framework that was rated, along with the numeric score and label.

 

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