Simple Standard Tracking for Students

Published: 2023-09-11 8:36 PM

Category: Assessment | Tags: teaching, standards, sbg, standards based grading

I took a little while to think about how I'd like students to be able to track their progress on learning standards in class. The web app I built works and will give them a long-term view of their growth over time, but in the moment, I wanted students to have an easy, quick-reference spot to see their progrss on the unit's standards.

For each unit, they get a simple cover page with an introduction, a guiding question, the learning goals, and some vocab. This goes into their learning log (more on that in another post) and marks the next chunk of content. I decided to make this one-page unit marker into two pages by adding the standard tracker.

This half-sheet handout will get put at the start of the unit and updated when feedback comes in. The 1-4 scale refers to their feedback scales:

0. No submission.
1. Does not meet expectations. I got something, but it's waaay off base and I cannot use that evidence to give any kind of meaningful feedback.
2. Approaches expectations. Their attempt is close, but there is a major gap or a major misconception holding them back from truly demonstrating the skill.
3. Meets expectations. They can do the thing, on this example, in this context. This is considered proficient on the attempt and should be what students are shooting for.
4. Exceeds expectations. They have demonstrated a clear understanding and have connected outside relevant ideas into their response.

The numeric scale allows me to calculate an overall score for that particular skill: the highest score averaged with the most recent score.

Anyways, the whole point is that students either need to log into another website to check their progress or check in with me. Providing this template will teach them to catalog their results and pay attention to their feedback. They don't have to hunt me down to figure out their score because it's all logged here as it happens.

I'm not sure one page will be enough, especially as we get into more complex topics and I'm assessing more frequently, but we'll start with one each. If we need more, the great thing about the interactive learning log approach is that we can just slap another copy in and keep going with our day.

Are you a teacher? Do you have thoughts on this approach? Send me an email - always looking for more perspectives.