Happy New Semester!

It's January, a time of new beginnings, new goals, and better ways of doing things, and we receive a fresh set of students for the second semester. For many of us this means pre-assessments, or Performance Series testing, and progress monitoring.

One teacher noted that based on Performance Series testing at the beginning and end of fall semester, several of her students had regressed during the course of the semester.  It's not very likely that instruction led students to unlearn what they already knew; more likely, students simply did not take the test as seriously the second time around, but this began a conversation about how to encourage students to take ownership of their success both as learners and as test takers; after all, success is as much about the student's motivation as it is about teaching strategies.

As a result of this conversation, we developed a Progress Record Sheet to use during student conferences. This document provides spaces for data from the Performance Series test, but it also provides spaces for student commitment, action steps, completion dates, and responses.

This is the link to the Progress Record Sheet.
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_st0L3yuiLIbFFaMUtFVHd6Y00

I hope that you find this document useful, and please post comments about how you tweeked the form to fit your needs and how well it worked for you.