Helping Students Track Learning and Growth

The fourth in a series of posts about the progress tracker for my ungraded course

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been writing about some changes I made to my fall course through the lens of my Progress Tracker, a course document that helps students keep up with their work and that encapsulates many of the new design choices I’ve made. Today I’ll discuss what I think is the most important part of the tracker, the section for Learning & Growth.

One of the persistent problems I encountered last semester was that when I asked students to assess themselves, they primarily did it based on measures like assignment completion and course attendance—not what they actually learned in the course. While I can’t say the three-page worksheet on Learning & Growth has totally solved this problem, I do think it’s helping students understand what they’re supposed to be getting out of the course and to think about the quality of their work more deliberately, and in more specific terms.

Identifying a Purpose for Learning

The tracker starts out with our learning goals, using language adapted or simply copied from the departmental goals for this course. In addition to communicating what students should be able to do by the end of the course, I also added my own language to explain why these course goals were worth pursuing. 

I do this for a few reasons. First, because transparency about purpose is demonstrably beneficial to students. When I first heard about transparent assignment design—which asks instructors to explain not just the task and assessment criteria for an assignment but also the purpose behind the work—it was a lightbulb moment. I’d just been taking for granted that students understood why we were doing what we were doing. But since I started intentionally sharing the reasons I ask students to do certain things, I’ve seen both better buy-in and stronger student work. I now explain the purpose for everything: major assignments, homework assignments, in-class activities, and, more broadly, the learning goals of the course. (It also keeps me accountable: if I can’t come up with a really good rationale for including a task or a goal in the course, there’s a good chance that I need to rethink what I’m doing.)

This kind of transparency is important for any course, but I think it’s especially important for required/gen ed courses, first-year courses, and ungraded courses. If we want students to move beyond the idea that they’re completing academic tasks because the teacher said so and for no other reason, then we have to give them a compelling explanation of why those tasks are important. 

I also try to help students understand the purpose of the course beyond the benefits it might offer to them as individuals. One of my absolute favorite recent studies in teaching and learning is called “Boring but Important: A Self-Transcendent Purpose for Learning Fosters Academic Self-Regulation.” The authors define a “purpose for learning” as “a goal that is motivated both by an opportunity to benefit the self and by the potential to have some effect on or connection to the world beyond the self” [emphasis mine]. In addition to encompassing individual benefits like the promise of a lucrative or fulfilling career, a purpose for learning also includes a prosocial component that transcends self-interest and might involve service to others or to a cause of some kind. The authors conclude that adding a self-transcendent motivation to a self-oriented one can “foster greater meaning in schoolwork and promote academic self-regulation as students take on tedious learning tasks.”

I don’t personally find writing tedious, but most of my students do, at least at first. First-year writing also requires a lot of academic self-regulation, the ability to persist when the task gets difficult or boring or when tempted by compelling distractions. So, explaining the self-oriented and self-transcendent purposes for the writing tasks my students complete seems especially important. 

I used the Progress Tracker as an opportunity to do this. Underneath each learning goal, I wrote “Why do this?” and tried to provide a compelling purpose that emphasized the social impacts of what we were learning. For example, students might want to hone their sense of purpose and audience in order to “write arguments with real meaning to real people,” as well as to themselves. They might want to develop skills in research not just to become effective communicators but also to “make the world a better, more informed place.” I also try to reference, reinforce, and expand on these ideas throughout the semester, especially when we discuss the rationale behind major assignments. 

I think the students appreciate this practice, but honestly, it’s just as important for me. It helps to remember that I am teaching students important things that will help them solve pressing problems—and that maybe, possibly, some real-world good will come about as a result of what happens in my classes. 

Goal-setting for Growth

Like other sections of the tracker, the pages for Learning & Growth also include a box for students to write in their own personal learning goals at the beginning of the semester, and I provide some guidance for helping them set good ones. I’ve just been looking back on those goals in preparation for our final conferences this week. 

I actually think this goal-setting process may be more helpful to me than it is to the students, because one of the main things it does is surface misconceptions or gaps in students’ perceptions about writing. Students can only talk about writing in the ways they understand it, and at the beginning of the semester, that understanding is naturally limited. They often talk about wanting to expand their vocabulary, improve their grammar, or get to a point where writing feels less difficult. I always have bad news for them about the final point: writing never gets less difficult, it just gets differently difficult. The other goals are things that we do work on, but they’re often lower-priority goals—students should be able to construct a coherent argument before we worry too much about comma splices. But at that point in the semester, students haven’t yet imagined what their writing could be, beyond being technically correct and full of ten-dollar words. 

I do think, however, that it’s helpful for students to think about what they want to improve and then revisit that goal at the end of the semester to consider whether or not they have achieved it. And many students do set ambitious goals that are more in line with their holistic development as writers. Many simply state that they want to become more confident in their writing ability, another goal that they, and I, find useful to revisit throughout the semester. 

Moreover, I’ve found that when asking students at the end of the semester what they have accomplished, they’re more likely to talk about higher-priority achievements, like moving beyond the five-paragraph essay, writing for audiences besides the teacher, or better understanding research-based argumentation. In the future, I may ask them to revisit their initial goals specifically to see if and how their perception of writing has changed. I’m not sure if it would work—but it would be an interesting exercise.

Documenting Progress

Finally, the Learning & Growth section includes a couple of different ways for students to document their progress. 

The first is through a series of checkboxes that allows them to track how they are progressing along the developing/proficient/excellent scale on each of the learning goals of the course. When I return feedback on major assignments, I also return a rubric that marks where I believe their work falls on each of the criteria: writing process, exploration & argumentation, purpose & audience, research & evidence, and grammar & mechanics. If students are still at the level of developing on any categories, it’s a signal that they should focus their efforts there in their revisions. 

I’ve noted before that I’m a bit ambivalent about these marks (aren’t they just As, Bs, and Cs by another name?), but I do think they give students a benchmark to measure against and an indication of what I expect from their writing. The scale has the added benefit of helping students see when and how they move from developing to proficient to excellent in their revision process—or if they don’t improve, to consider why not.

So, the checkboxes allow students to note, across the class in general, when they feel they have achieved proficiency or excellence on our learning goals. 

The other way students can document their progress is through three text boxes where they can write general qualitative observations or make notes about their writing strengths and areas for improvement. I really don’t know if students have taken advantage of these text boxes, as I don’t take up their progress trackers to check. But my hope is that they provide a useful space to set short-term goals or engage in metacognitive reflection. And in the future, I may request to see the documents at various points throughout the semester to understand if and how students are using them. 

That’s all for now. Next week, I’ll write a fifth and final post about the Progress Tracker, and what guidance I provide for students in determining their final grades. Stay tuned!