Introducing the Progress Tracker

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

Last week, I mentioned that I had developed a new tool for tackling some of the challenges I’ve encountered in my ungraded writing courses. That tool is the Progress Tracker, a comprehensive series of worksheets that students use throughout the semester to keep track of reading and assignments; attendance and engagement; and learning and growth. The tool also includes a guide to determining final grades at the end of the course.

Today, I’ll share a bit about the development of the tracker, how I introduced it to students, and how we’ve been using it in class.

Developing the tracker

I noted in a previous post that I have some ambivalence around checklists and contracts. I’m concerned that students tend to come into their courses, especially first-year general education ones, with a transactional mindset. Very often they (and we!) view these courses as a series of tasks to complete and boxes to check rather than opportunities to learn something. While I used a course checklist at the end of last semester, I was concerned that the document might reinforce this mindset. 

I’m not sure whether such tools actually do encourage students to take a transactional approach, but I’ve come to think that, for my context at least, their potential benefits outweigh their potential costs. Students struggled last year to keep track of their work and were occasionally confused about what they would need to demonstrate in order to attain a certain grade, even when I thought I had communicated my expectations clearly. Being even more explicit about those expectations and providing a way for students to track their progress will, I think, benefit everyone. 

I settled on three main things I think students needed help tracking—their learning tasks, their class engagement, and their learning itself—and devoted a section to each. I wanted to keep the document to 7-8 pages, if possible. Unfortunately, it ballooned to 12. I’m not satisfied with the length, though I can’t say that it has presented any problems so far. We’ll see if that remains the case. 

I’ll talk through each of the document’s main sections in the coming weeks. For now, I’ll share how I introduced the tracker to the class and how we’re using it. 

Introducing the tracker (and the grading system)

I didn’t give students this document on the first day of class, because I was concerned it might be overwhelming. At our first meeting, we did some community-building exercises and hit the high points of the syllabus. I devoted the second day to a discussion about our grading system and the progress tracker.

I began the discussion by asking students to answer a word cloud question on PollEverywhere: “What words, feelings, or concepts come up when you hear the word ‘grades’?” Student answers align closely with what I’ve seen in other reflection activities on this topic:

The prominence of the words “anxious” and “stress” here really says it all. But I was also struck by the word “pointless.” While some students characterized grades as motivating, many felt they didn’t do much besides create an unnecessary burden.

I then asked students to think of a positive or negative experience they’ve had with grades in the past and share that experience with a classmate. We debriefed as a large group to find the common threads between those experiences. 

What we discovered won’t be surprising for those of you who have been following the ungrading conversation. Students’ negative experiences mainly revolved around getting grades they felt were unfair, that they didn’t understand, or that didn’t seem to reflect the time and effort they put into an assignment. Students’ positive experiences, unfortunately, revolved around getting high grades for putting in very little effort. I noted this for the class and asked if anyone had a positive experience to share with grades that actually involved learning. While I’m sure one or two students had such experiences, no one volunteered to share. 

This presented a good opportunity for me to ask them what they thought about the connection between grades and learning. One or two students argued vehemently that grades were not representative of their learning. Others felt less strongly, but still agreed that in many cases, grades were not as meaningful as they could be. 

I used this as a jumping off point to explain the grading system for the course at more length. This semester’s system works in pretty much the same way as last. For reference, here’s how I explain it on the syllabus:

Evaluating Your Work

In this class, you’ll read, think, write, and collaborate with each other, completing work that is difficult to quantify or reduce to a single number or letter grade. Instead of assigning letters or numbers to your work, I'll provide substantive feedback on every major assignment you submit and will indicate whether I think the submission is developing, proficient, or excellent in achieving our learning goals. For these assignments, you will have the opportunity to revise and receive more feedback should you wish to do so.

We will meet once at midterm and once at the end of the course to discuss your progress. In our last individual meeting, you will assign yourself a final grade in consultation with me (and subject to my approval). At this meeting, you will make a case for what grade you think you should receive based on the evidence of your work—taking into account the quantity of work you submitted, the quality of work submitted, and your growth as a writer. I will, in turn, provide my own assessment of your progress toward our learning goals. The meeting will offer a holistic assessment of your work this semester rather than an average of graded activities.

We will talk more about the evaluation procedures for the course, and why I use them, at the beginning of the semester, but I invite you to contact me with questions or concerns about this system at any time.

After explaining the system and fielding a few questions, I turned to the Progress Tracker. I introduced the tracker to students as a way to help them understand their development in the course and to chart their progress toward a specific grade should they wish to do so. We went through each section, and I had students mark off the class dates they’d already attended and the short assignment they’d already completed. I also explained a goal-setting assignment that would be due at the end of the week, where they would fill in further sections of the tracker.

The First Assignment

The only formal, required work that students have done with the Progress Tracker is a short homework assignment designed not only to help them understand the primary goals of the course but also to help them consider how they would like to develop as students and writers over the course of the semester. 

They do this by filling in their own personal goals at the top of each section of the Progress Tracker. For the Readings and Assignments section, they set goals around timely submission of work and how to stay on track with their tasks in the course. For the Attendance and Engagement section, they set goals around class absences and participation in class discussion. For the Learning and Growth section, they set goals around the development of their writing and writing process. 

One thing I noticed when I asked students to set goals for themselves last semester is that they didn’t always set very good ones. The goals tended to be vague (“Improve my writing”) or potentially unrealistic (“Never miss a day of class”). To help students improve on this, I asked them to write goals that were specific, measurable, and attainable.

More importantly, I gave them some samples of original, ill-defined goals and improved, better-defined goals at the end of the assignment sheet. For example:

I will have good attendance.

becomes

I will miss no more than three classes (barring extenuating circumstances).

Or

I will get an A in the course.

becomes

I will commit to substantively revising all major assignments.

This didn’t result in universally better goals than last semester, but I would say that they were better on the whole. And they helped us set a foundation for the course that was built on not only what I wanted students to get out of it but also on what they wanted as well. 

Using the Tracker

Initially, I thought I would make use of the Progress Tracker optional so that students could choose whether or not to keep up with it. Technically, it’s still not a requirement. But in order to acclimate students to using the tracker, I did devote some class time in the first month of the semester to letting students fill it out. Every Friday, I would ask students to take five minutes to check off the assignments they’d done that week and make notes about their class participation and engagement. 

So, the tracker is optional in theory—but in practice everyone uses it, at least on the days when I ask them to. Students are not, however, required to submit the document to me at any point in the semester. 

Their work on the Progress Tracker does inform some of their other work in the course: specifically, the self-assessments and individual conferences we do at midterm and in the final week. The week before our midterm conferences, I devoted ten minutes of class to letting students fill out the boxes in the Learning & Growth section. In the final weeks, I’m also spending class time on the “Determining Your Final Grade” section.

I think this has a lot of advantages. The biggest one is that it gives students a jumping off point for the self-assessment work I ask them to do. Instead of having to rack their brains for what they’ve done or learned in the course, it’s all laid out clearly for them on the tracking sheet. I’m hoping it will result in self-assessments that are more grounded, detailed, and evidence-based—and also more realistic final grade proposals. Not that I received many unrealistic assessments last semester. But a couple of students did approach the final meeting as a chance to haggle over their final grade, which all of us found to be unproductive…

I just introduced the Final Portfolio and Self-Assessment assignment to my students earlier this week. I’m looking forward to reporting on how the Progress Tracker may improve (or not improve) students’ self-assessments. Stay tuned!