Reading the Mastery Heatmap

Overview

The mastery heatmap shows your entire class’s current proficiency level on every standard at once. Each cell is color-coded to match your rating scale, so you can immediately spot which standards the class has mastered, which are struggling, and which individual students need extra support. This article explains how to open the heatmap, read its cells and summary row, and navigate from it into student and standard detail views.

Opening the heatmap

Open the course you want to review.
Click Gradebook in the course navigation.
In the view toolbar, click the Heatmap button to switch from the table view to the heatmap.

Reading the heatmap

The heatmap is a grid: each row is a student and each column is a standard. Cells are color-coded by rating level — the same colors as your course’s rating scale.

Each cell shows the abbreviation of the student’s current rating for that standard (for example, P for Proficient or A for Advanced). A gray — means the student has not yet been assessed on that standard.

A legend at the bottom of the table shows each rating level’s color and full name.

The Proficient column on the right shows how many of the course’s standards each student is currently at or above the proficiency threshold — for example, 5/8 means 5 out of 8 standards are proficient or higher.

Reading the class summary row

The row labeled Class % at the bottom of the table summarizes class-wide performance for each standard.

The percentage shows how many students in the class are at or above proficiency for that standard.
The color bar below the percentage breaks down the full distribution: each segment represents a rating level and is sized by the percentage of students at that level.

Start by scanning the class summary row. Standards where the class percentage is low are the ones most worth addressing before your next assessment cycle.

Sorting and searching

To sort students:

Click Student to sort alphabetically by name.
Click Proficient to sort by how many standards each student has mastered.
Click the sort icon next to any standard code to sort by that standard’s rating, highest first.

To search for a student: Type in the Search students field at the top of the toolbar. The table filters in real time as you type.

Drilling into a standard or student

Click a standard code in a column header to open the Standard Deep Dive panel. It shows the class distribution for that standard, average rating over time across assessments, and a per-student breakdown with trend indicators.
Click a student’s name to open their full student profile. See Student Profile and Progress Cards.

The heatmap reflects each student’s current computed rating per standard — the output of your course’s proficiency calculation method, not any single assessment score. See Understanding Standard Proficiency and Rating Methods.