One of the most important parts of being a teacher is keeping track of student progress and understanding of concepts throughout a lesson. Without this, a teacher is without valuable information that shows which students need assistance, which students need a challenge, and which students are progressing through the lesson adequately.
As a part of my effort to gain perspective during my own instruction, I engaged in a progress monitoring project which required me to analyze data collected in my classroom during a lesson that I taught. The lesson that I taught was a 3rd grade lesson on geography, which was a part of my Literacy-Infused Unit. This was the first lesson in the unit, which required students to use Google Maps to view an NFL team's stadium and determine its relative location. Working with a partner, students viewed the maps to search for relevant information that would help them describe their stadium's location. These included streets, highways, buildings, landmarks, physical features, and more.
Once students applied what they had learned and determined the relative location of their stadium, they were asked to complete a short formative assessment, which assessed whether or not they could describe their stadium's location. They were given a total of seven minutes to work on this and they were allowed to use their maps to help them. Once the seven minutes had elapsed, I collected the papers from the students and moved on to the second half of the lesson. This part of the lesson challenged students to use what they researched to create an NFL team biography.
In order to organize and analyze the data that I collected, I used a combination of Google Sheets and Google Slides. Google Sheets is a program that works identically to Excel for Windows or Numbers for Mac. Google Slides is essentially PowerPoint. Because these programs are a part of the Google Drive, they have all of the added benefits of Google programs—including automatically saved work that is accessible anywhere there is internet access. They also has the capability to be embedded into websites, as they are on this page.
When organizing my data, I used Google Sheets and placed each student's name in one column. In the next column, I included the score that each student earned on their formative assessment. I scored the assessments based on the following expectations:
- 3 - Student has a great understanding of the relative location of their stadium and can describe it.
- 2 - Student understands relative location of their stadium, but needs help describing it
- 1 - Student does not understand relative location of their stadium.
After grading each assignment, I chose to analyze the data using Google Slides. I created a presentation, which can be found by following the link above, that discusses the assessment and interprets the data collected.
In this presentation, I included information about the school and classroom that I work in at Friendship Elementary School. I also discuss the next steps that I intend to take in order to ensure that the students that did not achieve mastery on the formative assessment eventually accomplish that. Although about 65% of the students assessed scored a 3 on the assessment, there were five students total that needed reteaching or a review in order to help them succeed throughout the rest of the unit plan.
As a future teacher, this project was invaluable to my students and the work that I will do with them. Taking the time to look through students answers thoroughly and determine a "grade" or "score" is not something that I have had the opportunity to do often in my internships. Being able to finally do this, however, showed me that this information is an invaluable teaching tool that will inform future lessons and help me as I intervene with students before their knowledge gap is too large.
I also think that this is an important project to learn how to use data to advocate for a student. I think that it is always important to use data when talking with parents or guardians. This project allowed me to work with data in a way that has prepared me to talk about it with other professionals or the caretakers of my students. Overall, I think that this project was incredibly essential to understanding what I will need to do the monitor the progression of students and their mastery of subjects as we move throughout the year.
