Checking the learning progress

Now that you have planned your approach and worked out your learning tasks, you need to plan how you will check for student understanding – how will you know that students are learning? Questions focused on the required learning are an important way to check the learning progress. This needs to occur throughout the lesson whether face-to-face or online, and needs to be planned for.

Consider the following.

a. Questioning. For example, ask a question of the entire group, and as you receive responses do not immediately offer feedback. Instead ask other students for their response, before giving feedback or modifying the responses given to ensure the correct answer is agreed. You may ask the group to respond to which responses they think are correct before confirming or modifying. The strength of this approach is that you may get several different responses, which gives you a sample of the students’ understanding. If necessary, you may need to go back over some of the key content to ensure that the learning process stays on track. Plan the questions you will ask to check for understanding and note them in your lesson plan at the appropriate times. Checking throughout your lesson means you can revise points or take different approaches before students lose contact with the required learning. The Faculty Focus website Links to an external site. provides many short articles on the ways in which discussion in the classroom can be used effectively.

b. Discussion groups. For example, break your group into smaller groups so that all students will have the opportunity to contribute. Be mindful of strategies for reporting back to the whole group and how this can be managed online. This takes time and can be tedious for the students if each group is reporting on the same ideas. Give each group a different topic or aspect of the topic to report back on. 

c. Student reflections on their learning. For example, ask your students to share something they learnt in the session.

d. Include practice of assessment activities. For example, in class work collaboratively on a graphic organiser to practice completing a component of an assessment task.  

e. Feedback. Provide feedback to the whole group as to their progress in the session and ask for their feedback. For example, providing the students with Post-it notes and asking them to tell you what were the most difficult aspects of the lesson, or what they most enjoyed, or what further questions they have will give them an opportunity to provide you with feedback. Having received this feedback from the students, in the next session you can then begin with your responses to their feedback, generating an ongoing exchange about the learning. Refer to Module 3. Feedback for learning for further information about feedback. 

Part of the process of checking the learning progress is for you to consider how you contributed to their learning through the design of your learning tasks and consideration of the leaning context and learning outcomes. So your planning needs to occur in a reflective cycle where the initial plan is reviewed after implementation with a view to checking its effectiveness against the outcomes expected. Some points of focus might be to what extent did:

• the learning tasks elicit the intended learning outcomes for the lesson;
• the students have a chance to learn from each other;
• you provide students with the opportunity to build self-confidence; 
• the questions you asked the students maximise the learning opportunities?

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