Engaging Students with Data: Teach students how to gather and use data on their student work in order to set and meet goals
Benefits of Engaging Students with Data:
- Builds metacognition
- Builds confidence
- Teaches students how to use self-knowledge to transform themselves
Data Strategies:
- Create a safe data culture
- Use checklists to track typical errors – students use these checklists to identify and count typical errors in their work
- Students and teachers look for patterns in recurrent assessments to see if students are progressing towards goals
- Align assessment, assessment analysis/reflection tools, and learning targets
- Set feasible, clear individual and class goals
- Alert parents to data inquiry cycle – what it is, why it’s useful and how to get involved in it
- Promote growth mindset
See benefits listed above. In addition, teaching students how to analyze their own learning data will teach them a life skill that will enable them to pursue and track their own goals outside school.
Preparation Steps
- Research tools that can be built into routines that help students track their data over time
- Research activities that can be used to build trust and illustrate the usefulness of tracking data
- Build a culture that values mistakes and progress through sustained effort
Early Implementation Steps
- Introduces tools (e.g. checklists of common pitfalls) that help students classify mistakes so they can develop a more clear picture of how to improve
- Model how to gather and organize data that illustrates progress of student learning “over time”
- Help students set class and individual goals that can be tracked by data
Advanced Implementation Steps
- Implement systems of data checks that enable students to graph and visualize their progress over time
- Design assessment practices and tools that allow students to track progress towards character learning targets