10 Introduction
Monitor Progress
Monitoring students’ progress is critically important. As
educators we must constantly analyze the progress of students.
To accomplish this we need to ask questions:Q Is the student making progress?
Q What does the student need to learn next?
Q How solid is the student’s understanding?
Q Does the student need more work with a specifi c concept?
Q Is the student having diffi culty maintaining and utilizing
specifi c concepts?
Q What misconceptions does the student have?
Q Where are the learning gaps?
Q Is the student’s knowledge incomplete? If so, what is
missing?The answers to these questions help us monitor the progress
of students. As we monitor progress, we make decisions about
how to target the instruction to meet the exact academic needs
of the students.Struggling students need to understand their progress. As
educators monitor the progress of students, they should share
it with the students. One way to do so is to regularly meet
with students and share evidence of the students’ gains in
knowledge. The evidence may be formative assessment data
and/or the actual preassessments and postassessments.
The evidence may be a copy of the game board with notes about
what a student did to solve problems or a paper that shows
how a student used specifi c concepts and strategies. Many
educators use these and other types of evidence to evaluate a
student’s performance. The key is to provide constant feedback
by sharing this information with the student.