How to evaluate learner progress | 4 ways you can monitor student understanding for more effective learning

Do you find yourself wondering exactly where your students are in terms of their learning when it’s coming to their exams or standardised tests? Are you looking for a more effective way to ensure that every lesson has an impact? Here are 4 ways you can consistently monitor student understanding to make your teaching more effective.

You teach and you set homework. They listen and hand in their assignments. Then every now and then they sit a test or an exam which will determine where they’re placed the following year, and as you get to the end of high school, what their options might be career-wise.

The challenge, as has been well observed, is that there can be a long time between sitting through a lesson, and actually sitting the exam or the test that it’s based on. While homework and intermediate, formative tests can help you identify areas for improvement, the classic mechanisms are slow, and lack agility.

1. Use a range of formative assessments to keep on top of how each student is retaining and applying learnings

For a definition, a formative assessment serves to monitor learning and provide feedback that teachers can use to better help students. It’s the classic solution to the problem we’re looking at. Formative assessments are a tool to help students and teachers more effectively prepare for summative assessments, such as standardised tests like the SATs or A-levels.

The problem is, taking a formative test at the end of a unit of learning, for example, can be too slow, and not quick enough to make an enormous difference to the help students are provided with. Are every 4 weeks or every 6 weeks enough to monitor how a student is performing? And if the unit of teaching is over, how are they going to get caught up? This is particularly challenging with students who aren’t motivated by the low stakes nature of a formative assessment, or perform better under a bit of pressure with more motivation to study.

Diversifying the nature of your formative assessment techniques is an effective starting point. You could potentially have check-ins with students individually on a fortnightly basis, by working in a lesson every couple of weeks that’s set up in a way for you to observe and move around the classroom to have 1-on-1s.

You could also look to create Quizzes which you can distribute digitally to students. These could be completed in the classroom, or form part of homework. As they’re digital, they remove some of the stress some students may feel, even from a mock testing environment.

By employing various formative assessment methods, and using them more frequently, you gain a more comprehensive understanding of the status of each individual’s learning, so you can adapt your teaching strategies more quickly.

2. Make gamification a foundation of your teaching approach for more data and quicker feedback cycles

By integrating gamification into your teaching methodology, you’ll be able to gather more feedback and data, and benefit from much faster feedback loops.

In a nutshell, gamification is a digital strategy to improve user engagement, or in this case, student concentration. By moving learning material from textbooks or lectures to interactive, immersive, and playable experiences, you can introduce students to new ideas through your teaching, reinforce teaching points by including informative video and text content throughout, and then have Quizzes and mini games that ask students to apply and demonstrate what they’ve learned.

This isn’t like asking the class a question and having a couple of confident students raise their hands, EVERYONE is participating. If your classroom is set up with tablets or computers, you could even make Quizzes for every lesson, and have every student answer the question you’ve asked the class.

This approach not only increases student engagement through interactivity, but also provides real-time data that can enable you to fine-tune your lesson as you’re teaching it.

Pro tip: If customising games sounds daunting, don’t worry. The Drimify gamification platform is designed to allow anyone to customise sophisticated gamification experiences. You don’t need any technical knowledge or experience to customise effective learning games.

3. Have an entrance and exit ticket system

Imagine for a second being taught how to read as an adult alongside people who are illiterate. Now imagine not being illiterate, but trying to participate in a postgraduate level seminar discussing Ulysses (or if you want to feel even more out of your depth, Finnegan’s Wake). Both would be entirely disengaging and unproductive learning experiences, and that’s precisely what entrance and exit tickets seek to avoid.

Putting in place such a system allows you to assess student understanding before and after each lesson. Students have to answer a brief question on the entrance ticket related to the upcoming or just-covered material.

You quickly analyse the responses to gauge prior knowledge and potentially adjust the intended learning outcomes.

This means that if one of your students could literally teach the class if they wanted to, you could assign them something more advanced, or if another student was woefully behind, or even a group of students lacked the foundational knowledge to grasp the concepts you were planning on exploring, you can split the class into 2 and make it more productive for everyone.

The exit tickets work on the same principle, but retroactively – did everyone understand and take something away from the lesson? If not, what do you need to do next time?

Pro tip: If you have IT facilities in your class, or your school allows students to use their phones in their school work, you could distribute your entrance and exit tickets as a Quiz with open answers. This means you can give your class a couple of minutes to fill in the ticket, and you can quickly see everyone’s answers in real-time in your dashboard instead of having to put them out and collect them again.

4. Use “aggressive daily monitoring” to make your classroom an agile, dynamic learning environment

Aggressive daily monitoring is where you maximise the efficiency of your classroom, almost making it like an agile workplace. This could start with the entrance and exit tickets discussed in the last strategy – immediately, you have some feedback to go on to set the students off on the most appropriate task first.

Remember, not every student needs to sit through every lesson, and some students won’t be ready for the lesson you’d planned.

Once the lesson begins you’re then going to observe and circulate, checking on students’ work as they do it and making adjustments in real-time. You’re not just checking students are on task and concentrating, you’re really looking at what they’re doing. If a student struggles with a specific concept, it’s addressed there and then, if multiple students are struggling with it, the class can be refocused and it can be looked at as a group.

Pro tip: The key to make this fairly intensive style of teaching work is being organised, and almost having multiple lesson plans for different students depending how they take to the subject matter.

With efficiency being key, this is an area where gamified learning really brings a lot of advantages, as rather than happening upon a student putting a wrong answer, you can see every student’s answers simultaneously on your dashboard as they interact with gamified media, which will make spotting trends and making sound judgements much faster.

When this approach is executed to its potential, all students’ exit tickets should show that they’ve left a productive lesson. It’s moving the feedback cycle for monitoring student performance from up to 6 weeks to being almost instant.

Key takeaway

Effective learning is determined by students being “on track.” It’s far easier to keep students on track if you’re operating on the fastest possible feedback cycles, so both students and teachers alike aren’t wasting their time in lessons that aren’t addressing the most pressing learning needs.

All the strategies continuously monitoring student progress listed here are actionable and practical, regardless of student age, level or ability.