So, you are a teacher, and you are looking to improve your teaching methods. Well, one of the key factors in achieving this is understanding your students. This not only means their personalities and their individual ways of learning; this also means their levels. By periodically setting formal and informal assessments, you, as a teacher, will be able to keep track of how your students are progressing, and what their levels are in the specific areas that you are teaching. Not only does this give you valuable data on your students’ levels, but can also be used as a measure to see whether your own teaching methods are effective. As a result, collecting such data can not only help your students, but it can also help you to grow as a teacher. Here are some of the key ways that collecting data can help improve your classroom:
- Personalisation
As a teacher, if you keep track of an individual student’s levels and progress, then you should be able to see which areas they excel in and which areas they struggle in. This will allow you to personalise the work that you give them, which will help them to focus more on the areas which they are not so good at. As a result, their overall levels should improve. To ensure that they have improved, another test may be necessary. You may be able to divide the class into two different tasks, if one half is struggling on one thing, and the other half is struggling on something else.
- Identifying students that are at risk
Without monitoring students’ levels, it would be very difficult to identify students who are at risk and are far behind. It is human nature to be too shy to say that we don’t know something, so it takes real guts to actually go through with it. As a result, many students will just sit there quietly pretending that they do understand, when in reality, they don’t. While this does make the teacher’s job a little harder, monitoring students through tests will make this easily identifiable.
- Self-improvement (as a teacher)
After collecting the results of a recent class examination and evaluating them, you may sometimes realise that the majority of the students did not do so well (or at least not as well as expected). If this is the case, then there are two likely reasons. Firstly, it could be that you have made the test too difficult. You should learn from this by making sure that there is nothing in the test that you haven’t covered. Secondly, it could be that your teaching simply wasn’t effective enough. Perhaps the teaching style that you used to teach that particular topic was not effective, and you may need to change. Eventually, you should be able to improve your teaching methods to the point that they meet the needs of your students.
If you’re a teacher looking at ways of collecting data on your students, be sure to check out educater.co.uk/software/school-pupil-tracker.
