Maintaining Assessment Data

When you know how to manage and use data to inform instructional practices, you can work more purposefully toward improving student achievement and optimizing student learning.

Many schools offer an online course/learning management system like Blackboard that keeps track of student progress and grades. Engrade and igradeplus offer trial/free software for maintaining student data as well. 

If your school doesn't offer an online course/learning management system, you can create assessment forms to use with your students. You can customize the forms as much as you deem appropriate, perhaps based on the readiness, interest, and learning profiles of your students. Since the forms are customizable, you can also align them to state standards. 

The Skills Assessment form directly below provides an example of two skills taught to a grade school child. This teacher could reassess as often as necessary, and easily share the data with the child's parents.

 

Skill Taught	Date	Skill Acquired	Comments	Reassessment	Comments
Penmanship	2/21	Partially	Work on when to use upper/lower case letters	3/25	Marked improvement
Grammar	2/23	Needs improvement	Confused on proper noun capitalization	3/30	Better with personal examples of “dog” and her dog’s name “Chips”

Here is a Goals Assessment Form. In this example, the student has chosen five goals he wishes to meet. Goals can be ones with which the student might struggle, or just benchmarks he or she will encounter along the way. The goals don't have to be listed in chronological order - they can be customized however they will work best for each student. In the example below, the student listed the goals from the ones he was most worried about to the ones he felt would be easiest to hit.

Sharing the assessments with students along the way holds them accountable.

 

Goals	Due Date	Goal Met	Student Comments	Teacher Comments
Finalizing Proposal	12/15	Pending	I am having a hard time writing this. Can I do a written proposal rather than oral?	Let’s discuss on Tuesday during resource time.
Meeting with expert	12/7	Yes	Listing questions before meeting helpful
Written summary of meeting with expert	12/13	Pending	Struggling to meet length requirement	Consider returning to expert with follow up questions or expanding upon some points the expert made
Locating Web sites for Project	12/1		Anticipate this will be easy for me
Creating 10 PPT slides	12/20
Finishing PPT slides	12/22			Will two days give you enough time?