The central objective of the student academic progress standard is to ensure that students are continually growing academically and meeting appropriate goals put in place by the teacher and/or school district. Teachers must ensure that they are working towards these goals throughout the year and that they are providing measurable academic results for student achievement. In addition, teachers must use student achievement data to communicate student progress.
Rubrics
One of the best ways to promote self-regulation is to provide students with a rubric which clearly defines what is expected of the student’s work and what grade the student can expect by successfully following the rubric’s outline. There are several major benefits to providing a rubric such as giving the student a predefined target, providing the teacher with a reliable way to fairly grade each student’s work, and providing an easy way to give the student feedback about their work.
Here is an example of a rubric that I designed for a biography presentation for the 4th grade: Biography Presentation Rubric.
Record Keeping
It is important that teachers keep clear and organized records of student academic progress throughout the year so that they can easily locate information that will help them create lessons tailored to individual needs and analyze student progress over time. Student academic records can also provide valuable information to the teachers who will be teaching the children in your class the following year. By keeping records of assessment data such as results from the Developmental Spelling Analysis (DSA) or running records, teachers not only see how much a child has grown academically, but also whether or not they are progressing towards reaching the goals or standards in place for that student.
For more information about the Developmental Spelling Analysis and to see examples of how it is administered, please see my paper on DSA.
Record of Pupil Learning
One important way to gauge student academic progress is to administer a pre-test before teaching a lesson and a post-test after finishing the lesson. A pre-test gives teachers invaluable information about what students already know or do not know about the topic. They can use this information to concentrate their lessons on aspects of the unit that students are struggling with. The post-test provides the teacher with information about how much students learned throughout the unit. Teachers can use this information to self-reflect by looking at which aspects of the unit many students struggled with and altering their approach to teaching thse topics in future years. After adminstering a pre-test and a post-test, teachers can create a Record of Pupil Learning which outlines the change in test scores from the beginning of the unit to the end. Below is an example of a Record of Pupil Learning that I completed after teaching a two week unit on electricity in a 4th grade class.
For further information, please see my Professional Practice Standard Paper on Student Academic Progress.