Unit 8: Measure, Understand, and Share Student Growth

Imprtant Takeaways from this Unit:

• Use Google Forms to help keep assessment data on students.
• Learn functions to sum, average, and powerful tools to help determine at risk students and those who need challenged.
• Use graphs in Google Sheets to display student data.
• Help students gauge their own understanding by looking at their data displayed in a graph.  Better yet, teach them how to graph it themselves!
• Taken directly from Google Training Cernter Fundamentals: Bar charts are the most common way to graph data for analysis. There are a variety of bar charts including bar, column, and the powerful, stacked bar, which can display a large amount of information in a compact space.
  Pie charts provide an easy way to display the results from an entire class. As a whole, the teacher can analyze which areas the class is strong or weak in. However, the most important aspect of this exercise is not just recording the correct answers, but also determining why students thought other wrong answers were correct. These results are anonymized, so others cannot determine the scores of an individual student when the summary report is shared with the class.
  Throughout each semester, teachers collect information on student performance. If we are able to visualize these results over time we might be able to draw conclusions about each student’s learning. There may be other things that have impacted a student on a particular day. However, it may be more telling to see if there is a general up or down trend over time. If we see a student slipping then we can intervene and get the student back on track before it’s too late. In this case, a line chart is a great tool to help us track performance over time.
  Line charts can also be especially helpful if you are using assessment standards, which are assessed several times over a grading period. By keeping a spreadsheet with the student names in the first column and date columns for each time the standard is assessed you can create a line graph to see how the student is trending. Each column is used to record the student performance on a particular day.
• I feel that using the graph feature in Google Sheets is teachers' most powerful, yet underused tool!
• Be sure to protect a sheet if you are going to share the data with another teacher.