Student Perspectives on the Progress Tracker
More reflection from my fall course
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my students’ perspectives on ungrading at midterm and at the end of my fall Writing 101 course. This week, I’ll share some of their responses to the Progress Tracker, a document I created for students to keep up with their work and learning and that I wrote a series of posts on late last year:
I forgot to ask students about their experiences with the tracker at midterm, but I did remember in the final week of the course. Here are the questions I asked:
Did you use the WRIT 101 Progress Tracker to keep up with your tasks, class engagement, and learning this semester?
Yes, I kept up with it on my own
Yes, but only when required in class
No, not at all
Other…
If you used the Progress Tracker in any capacity, do you feel it supported your learning in this course?
Yes
No
Partially
What do you like best or least about the Progress Tracker? How did it support or not support your learning?
Every student except for one indicated that they used the tracking worksheets throughout the semester—but, as I suspected, more than half of those who said they used it also reported that they only filled it out when given time to do so in class.
The good news is all the students who used it indicated that the Progress Tracker supported their learning in some capacity. The perhaps worse news is that while one third said that it supported their learning without reservation, two-thirds said it only “partially” supported their learning.
I’m trying to figure out if this is something I ought to be concerned about or if it’s just an indication that students don’t necessarily see the connection between “learning” and keeping track of assignments—more on that below.
Here were the major themes in student comments about the Progress Tracker:
It helped students stay organized and keep up with work.
I really liked it and think it supports me learning really well because it kept me on top of all my work and it was easy to see when certain assigments were due
I liked being able to see a whole outline of the class for the whole semester, see dates we would’t have class and see all of our assignments for the whole semester.
I feel like the progress tracker was a big help. it helped me know exactly what assignments where due that week and I could keep track of days I went to class and didn’t.
This is the biggest, and most obvious benefit of the tracker: all the assignments and course meetings are clearly laid out for students in a way that makes it easy to keep up with. Students have the cognitive load of 5 (or more) courses to manage at any given time, so the more things I can do to make this easier for them, the better.
It supported self-assessment and final grade assignments.
The progress tracker helped me to assess myself at the end of the year and assign a grade
I like that it is a resource available so that the student can cover the bases on what our grades should look like at midterm and final conferences.
It helped me when writing my midterm and final analysis. It was any easy way to track my growth.
This wasn’t my main motivation for creating the tracker, but the deeper I got into it, the more I saw how beneficial it was to students’ evaluation of their own work. The worksheets make it easy to see, at a glance, how many assignments they completed, and I also added spaces for students to reflect on their writing strengths, weaknesses, and growth over time. My hope was that this would make self-assessment and metacognition ongoing processes—not just something that happens once or twice a semester. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I agree with students that the tracker was helpful in determining final grades.
It may have provided dopamine hits.
It feels good to check off events, adds a sense of moving through the semester if that makes sense.
This wasn’t a huge theme, but I did get the idea that students derived some level of emotional satisfaction from being able to check off tasks as they completed them and see the progression of their work and thought throughout the semester.
It wasn’t universally helpful.
I think some of the progress tracker was not super beneficial to me. I did really like being able to check off homework assignments when completed and see how far through the course I am, but sometimes I did just use it because I felt like I should and less because I felt like it was helpful.
The progress tracker did help me, but I had problems with keeping up with it and making sure it was filled out consistently. However, this is a “me” problem as I have always had problems keeping up with planners and am a more go with the flow type of person.
For the student who doesn’t really need help with organizing or self-reflecting, the Progress Tracker does probably feel like busy work. That would have been me as a student. If you had handed me this document, even in my first year of college, I would have probably thought it a bit infantilizing. But I don’t believe the majority of students feel this way.
The other comment here—that interacting with the document consistently was something of a chore—indicates a more common problem. I think I was able to get around this by allocating some class time to using the tracker. But part of me wonders how useful it actually is if students have to be continuously prompted to use it.
Overall, I think the Progress Tracker was a success. But I can’t help noticing how many of the comments above were about checking off tasks and moving toward a grade—not about reflecting on writing or learning. Not that these things are totally in conflict. In fact, if I’ve done my job, it will be hard to separate the completion of learning tasks from the actual learning.
Certainly, however, it is possible for students to move through an entire class completing academic tasks, even at a satisfactory level, without actually learning anything. And, as I’ve mentioned before, I am concerned that students tend to approach general education courses in this way: as a checklist to be knocked out rather than an opportunity to learn.
It’s possible the Progress Tracker encourages this way of thinking, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the document is genuinely helpful in decreasing cognitive load and therefore enabling deeper learning. And there are other ways to combat the checklist mindset. Overall, both my students and I had success with the Progress Tracker, and I’ll use it again, perhaps in a slightly simplified form.
Next time, I’ll share the last round of student perspectives from my fall course, this time on generative AI. Stay tuned!
Thank you for this series - I've found it very helpful! Thinking about your reflections at the end, and looking back at the Progress Tracker: It seems like the Tracker is asking students to engage in two different kinds of thinking, one primarily organizational (checking off completed items) and one more reflective. Both of these things seem super useful, but I wonder if students may be having trouble moving between them. Would it be helpful to give them each their own separate space?
I do think the checklist is a great idea in an ungraded class, in that it gives students a sense of orientation and progression without introducing grades.