Unlocking Discovery: The Dynamic Progress Tracker
Explore how the Progress Tracker transforms student learning by facilitating self-assessment and collaborative sensemaking, ensuring every discovery builds toward deeper understanding.
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Prompt
The Progress Tracker is a formative and self-assessment tool that is designed to help students keep track of important discoveries that the class makes while investigating the phenomena, and to help them figure out how to prioritize and use those discoveries to focus on explaining the phenomenon they’re working on. Students will refer back to the tracker regularly to revise or build on their models, explanations, and/or designs for their current thinking about the phenomenon. Furthermore, students, and the class as a whole, will use the tracker as a way to think with others about what is important in their models, explanations and/or designs. It is important to note that this tool is designed to be a dynamic resource that students can use to progressively make sense of their ideas. OpenSciEd suggests that teachers use this tool to support progressive sensemaking throughout the unit, and avoid using this tool as a simple note-taking activity. In the teacher guidance for each lesson that uses Progress Trackers, suggestions are given for supporting students in using the tracker in a way to identify discoveries and use those discoveries to continually revisit, revise, and prioritize ideas. In order to avoid Progress Tracker fatigue, teachers should not have students use the tracker every day in the same way, but rather, use it to further the sensemaking when applicable. There are two structures that teachers can use during any OpenSciEd Unit. The choice provides teachers with flexibility to customize for their local context. 1. The two column Progress Tracker in a science notebook that includes only the “Question” and “What I figured out” columns. a. In the “What I figured out” column students can draw pictures or write in words, bullet points, whatever way is most meaningful for that individual. By having no structured box, students can take up a lot of space or a little space. Whenever a student is done, they can draw a line after their work to make space for the next time a teacher instructs them to write in their tracker. b. If a teacher decides that the class needs a break from using the tracker, the class simply doesn’t fill it out and the next question would appear directly below (no blank rows would appear in the students’ trackers). 2. The three column Progress Tracker that includes columns for “Question”, “Source of Evidence”, “What We Figured Out/Representation of Our Ideas” a. Students work on this row after important punchlines in the unit are figured out as a class, usually after the class came to consensus about an idea or set of ideas. However, it occurs more than only when the Putting the Pieces Together Routine is used. b. We do not suggest skipping this Progress Tracker move in the unit. If these pieces are missing, students may have trouble moving forward in their sensemaking. c. One place students can fill these out is during the “navigation routine” the next day after the class comes to consensus on something. This way it avoids the redundancy of coming to consensus and directly recording individually what the class figured out. It can also help reinforce using the Progress Tracker as a tool for formative and/or self-assessment.
