Dramatic Academic Growth
Students are not merely meeting, but exceeding, academic benchmarks for success. Tracking such progress requires careful collection and analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data.
Introduction
Measuring students' academic progress is an inherently tricky enterprise. Mental measurement has long been a goal within the social sciences, but the histories of psychology, sociology, and even physiology are littered with examples of erroneous conclusions about intelligence, knowledge, and the factors that affect them. Results on early versions of the SAT, for example, were cited as evidence that American Jews were less intelligent than American Christians.
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Against this inauspicious backdrop, teachers must attempt to quantify how much their students learn. Standardized tests offer one benchmark for student knowledge, but savvy educators understand that they do not offer a complete picture of student achievement. Thus, it is essential that teachers embrace a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches when trying to describe student progress. In this section, I delve into one example of each type of approach. Click the button on the left to learn more about my students' results on standardized i-Ready tests. Click the button on the right to learn more about a qualitative assessment of my students' abilities to solve novel problems and write explanations of mathematical thinking that I developed and implemented in my classroom this year.
Conclusion
Great teachers expand students' access to information and opportunities, help them build productive habits and mindsets, and prepare them to be advocates for themselves and others. But, at the the end of the day, the primary responsibility of any teacher is to ensure that his or her students are learning. A great teacher must hold the bar still higher. Especially when students begin the year behind their peers in other parts of the world, it is not enough for them to make a year's worth of improvement. Any improvement is to be celebrated, of course, but a truly transformational teacher has to push students to build more than one year of new knowledge between August and June. Only this sort of dramatic academic growth will prepare young scholars for success in high school, college, and beyond.