Measuring student progress

There are a multitude of different ways to measure student comprehension and teacher performance in the classroom, from student self-assessments to daily quizzes. Unfortunately, many of the most common performance measures involve a great deal of paper grading for teachers. The upside is that the data that can be gathered from the administration of frequent check-ins, formative assessments, and other testing tools can be helpful for much more than simply measuring achievement or assigning grades. They are also particularly useful for providing feedback and insight into what lessons are being learned, what content areas are creating stumbling blocks, and what teaching methods are proving to be most successful. It is getting those papers graded in a timely manner in order to access actionable information that is the challenge.

To ensure that teachers can respond to the formative feedback available, student assessments and other assignments must be scored promptly. That is why so many teachers rely on some type of paper grader app, software, or other paper grading system. Depending on the level of flexibility and functionality, this can greatly speed up the grading process. It is not uncommon for these test grader systems to involve pre-printed bubble sheets that allow teachers to use basic multiple choice or true/false question types that students can answer. These answer forms can be scanned by a special document camera or other scanning device that can fairly speedily score the correct responses. This expedites the time it takes for teachers to grade papers, but that is where the benefits tend to stop.

Before and after grading papers

Expediting the grading of quizzes, tests, homework, papers, and other assignments is certainly a valuable timesaver for teachers, but it is really only one step in a rather complex assessment administration process. Before assessments can be even given, they must first be created. But limiting the answer options to standard multiple choice means also limiting the usability for answers that do not neatly fit within a standard format, like number grids, rubrics, and handwritten responses. Additionally, it is important for today’s teachers to be able to connect test questions to one or more mandated or custom standards for tracking and reporting purposes. And, of course, once papers are scored, the data they provide still has to be compiled, analyzed, and recorded.

The data educators ultimately gather from grading papers often also needs to be able to be shared in a variety of different ways for parent/teacher conferences, Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), administrative reviews, mandated reporting requirements, etc. These preparatory and post-test tasks can take up an enormous amount of time above and beyond the actual grading, despite the paper grading component being the primary focus of attention in any assessment conversation. In fact, even the manual transfer of student scores into a teacher gradebook is a more burdensome task than most administrators appreciate according to a recent Tech & Learning report. In the larger context of assessment processes and corresponding teacher needs, any paper grader technology than just grades papers is only saving time at one stage of a multilayered, time-consuming process.