How can we measure and report progress in a meaningful way?
https://teacherhead.com/2018/06/18/how-can-we-measure-and-report-progress-meaningfully/ Tom Sherrington, June 2018
Thank you to those who made it to Journal Club this week. It was lovely to see so many new faces! We had a wide-ranging and stimulating discussion building from Tom Sherrington’s blog post on how teachers can best measure and report progress for the students in their classes. Here are just some of the ideas raised.
It is important first to distinguish between effort, progress, and attainment. Progress includes the assimilation of new knowledge and the development and improvement of relevant skills. Comparison between students is unlikely to be fruitful for measuring individual progress; if all members of a group make progress an individual’s standing will remain unchanged. To measure progress we must focus on the individual and should consider quantitative data, and the teacher should keep qualitative records of the feedback they have given and how the pupil has responded.
Recording an individual’s test scores can be of use if the teacher investigates the cause behind those that are noticeably higher or lower than expected. Problems arise from over-reliance on data as it can be difficult to standardise from one test to another as different content may be assessed, the style or difficulty of questions can vary, and indeed other factors in the pupils’ lives at the time of a given topic can have an effect. Quantitative data must be viewed in the context in which it was taken, both for individual pupils and the class.
To record meaningful qualitative data teachers first need a clear idea of what they want students to learn from a given piece of work, a topic, and the whole course. When marking a piece of work the teacher should assess the pupil’s knowledge and skills, and consider feedback, in light of these aims. It can be helpful for the teacher to record the key feedback they have given to the pupil in their mark book as this will allow them to keep track of patterns in their feedback, how the pupil responds, and ultimately how they are progressing. In a classroom environment it easy to make skewed judgements about a pupil’s progress and thorough records increase the reliability of our opinions.
A teacher’s understanding of the skills required at different developmental stages becomes clearer with experience, as does knowledge of the usual pitfalls and the best strategies to help students improve. It is important for departments to share ideas of key skills, appropriate times to introduce them, and what progress looks like for a particular year group, in order to support new staff in measuring and recording progress.
When reporting progress it is important to communicate an appropriate context. Marks shared with parents indicate attainment, and this should be coupled with a detailed comment on what that means for the individual including what knowledge and skills they have developed, what they need to continue working on, and how best they can go about that. A thorough mark book from the year can act as a comment bank for construction of these reports. If reporting data for central tracking, a projected grade alongside the attainment grade can indicate context.
If you have any thoughts to add it would be great to hear from you! Please leave a comment (tab at the side).
NLCS Teaching and Learning 