Teachers have a powerful tool, a spreadsheet, that can help them to monitor students' growth. Say she wants to track her kids during the year on the goal of interpreting and reacting to charts, a subpart of Standard 1 in English Language Arts. She can easily create a standard-specific goal-focused spreadsheet to assist in the monitoring.

Spreadsheet Creation

She opens the spreadsheet program. She labels this spreadsheet as "Standard 1.2 -Graphs" (the 1 is for the English Language Arts Standard 1and the .2 is for the learning goal of graphs), in the topmost cell, A1. Spreadsheet cell names use the column (going across) first and then the row (going down) so A1 is the first column and the first row in that column. This English teacher understands that in this section of the spreadsheet, she will only enter grades for this interpreting charts subpart of the bigger standard. Then she puts in the label “Students” in cell A2 and “Assessments” in B3,the next cell to the right.

Next, she lists the students' names (last name, first name) going down the left side of the spreadsheet in the first column starting with A4, then below to A5 and continuing down the spreadsheet. Going across the columns starting in the second column (B3, C3, D3, etc.), she records the names or dates of the various assessments for this specific learning goal within the standard. For example, the teacher may assess that learning goal once every month so she labels each with the month such as Sept. or she may use a more descriptive label like radiowrit for writing based on listening to the radio. She decides on a standard scoring scale to be used on all the assessments in this section, such as out of 100, or out of 4 (Above Proficient), 3 (Proficient), 2 (Developing), and 1 (Beginning). As the students take the first assessment on interpreting and reacting to graphs, the teacher records the scores going down the second column (B) starting with B4, which is the start of the assessment area.

First Analysis with the Spreadsheet

This educator now has a listing of the student grades for this assessment. However, by using the sort tool of the spreadsheet, she can transform the listing into more useful information. She highlights the names and the scores and then goes up to “Data” and then to “Sort.” She tells the spreadsheet to sort by the first assessment which is in the second column (column B) through the pull down menu, and has the data be arranged in “ascending order” (low to high). She sees the students scores in the order of low to high scores and therefore, she can immediately see those students who do not do proficient work. Furthermore, she can observe groupings of students, those who are distant from being proficient, those who are close to being proficient, and those who are already proficient; then the teacher can consider those groupings for direct instruction in the next few days.

Additional Analysis

This English teacher continues this assessment analysis pattern. She gives an assessment on this learning goal, records it, highlights all the names and grades, sorts the information by the most recent assessment (the farthest right column) and by ascending order. She looks for the patterns in the students' learning over time. The teacher notices that over the present three assessments “Barbour, Salaam” is still far below proficiency. She realizes that she will have to work one-on-one with her. She notices that numerous students are fairly close to being proficient so she decides to work with them as a small group. She is aware that many students are already proficient; she asks them to share their strategies with the non-proficient students in pairs or small groups.

Through the use of the spreadsheet, she monitors each student's growth (or lack of growth) in real time. As soon as she records the grades, she instantly sorts and sees the newest learning results and the results of all the previous learnings. She constantly knows which students need more personalized instruction to be successful. Likewise, she can celebrate the individual's successes as more and more students become proficient in this learning goal.

Dr. Harry Grover Tuttle focuses on assessing and improving student learning through low- and high-tech tools.

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