Tracking Student Progress

Hand in hand with goal setting comes tracking your students' progress.  I mean, how do you know if your students have met their goals unless you check?

The school already requires the teachers who teach similar classes to give common assessments and to track the students' scores on them.  We keep track of average scores, % of students who are advanced, proficient, close to proficient, far to go, and missed the boat (our own terminology for it).  I have been doing this for each of my classes, as well as keeping a running total.

I have also been keeping track of how well my students are doing on certain standards.  I chose a handful of standards my students need that go throughout the entire year.  I call them power standards, although I'm not sure I'm necessarily using the phrase correctly.

How do I track the power standards?  Well, for each of the common assessments (we make our unit tests our common assessments, as well as our final exams), I figured out which questions matched up with one of my power standards.  I then tracked how many students in each class missed these questions.  I could then keep a running total of the accuracy percentage of my students on each standard.

It sounds difficult, but it's really not.  It's just a little time consuming.  For example, on our Short Story Unit Test, question #s 1, 7, 12 and 15 were on characterization.  I tracked how many students missed each of these particular questions.  If 12 out of 23 of my students in a particular class missed question #1, 15 of them missed #7, 2 missed #12, and  none of them missed #15, then my students in that class had a 68.5% accuracy (meaning the amount they got correct) on characterization.

I could then track how each class did on each of the standards for each of the tests.  This way I could track their progress over the semester.  Again, it was a lot of math, a lot of tic-marks, and a bit time consuming, but it was well worth it.  I find it absolutely fascinating to see how my students are doing.  My students find it absolutely fascinating as well (no lie--they want to see their progress).  Plus, it's super motivating for them.

Want to know what it looks like?  Well, here are some of the graphs I made just by entering the data into excel and having it create some for me.

This is an example from one of my classes, tracking how many students were at each level on each test. 

This is what it looks like when I track test score averages for each class on each test.

This is the tracking on all of the skills that were on the final by each class.  This way I can see which classes did better on the skills.  Maybe then I can pinpoint WHY one class did better than another on a skill.

This is an example of the power standards proficiency levels on each test for a particular class.  This way I can see improvement (or not) on each power standard.  The hope is to see improvement over time.  This isn't always the case, though, especially since the tests get increasingly more difficult over time.

What do you think?  Do you track your data?  If so, do you have suggestions for me?