Bitesize Research: Strategies To Measure Progress

By Jaya Carrier

I hope everyone’s had a great week - and that when the holiday does come around, that everyone has a restful break! This week, following on from Rob’s briefing about drive and purpose, I was really interested in an article by Isabella Wallace, who has published widely on different education themes. Here she discusses the importance of pupils being able to see their own progress, as well as offering some practical strategies about how progress can be shown in different activities. Objectives: To understand strategies for measuring progress in a lesson. Summary:

• Wallace argues that students seeing their own progress is very important because it’s highly motivating.
• Some of the practical strategies proposed by Wallace in the article to show progress include:
• Before and after snapshots - this could be done in lots of ways but includes asking students to define a concept at the start of the lesson, and then to define it again at the end of the lesson, incorporating everything they’ve been learning (‘boarding and landing cards’)
• Getting students to add to what they know by using different colour pens - so they can see the progress over time
• Getting students to pose their own questions at the start of a lesson, and getting them to answer these at the end of a lesson
• Wallace also cautions against things that do not meaningfully show progress. This includes - asking students to show you thumbs up or thumbs down if they understand.
  

How does this impact me and my practice?:

Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• How do I measure the progress of my students across the course of a lesson? And across the course of a term?
• How well do my students understand their own progress?
• What might the benefits be of highlighting progress to students be?

If you would like to discuss this further with me - please let me know! I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.