Introduction

TrackingLearning:On-line

A new on-line resource from TLO

Are your students becoming better learners?

You can use TrackingLearning:On-line to analyse how students' learning habits are strengthening over time

You can use results from TrackingLearning:On-line to focus learning conversations and plan for personalised learning

Supporting the building of learning power

More and more teachers are beginning to work with what are sometimes referred to as fourth-generation approaches to learning to learn. Their efforts are scaffolded by Professor Guy Claxton's work on learning dispositions (the four R's) and the learning capacities that make up those habits of successful learners.

This early work will have involved raising students' awareness of their learning habits through conversations, displays and classroom activities underpinned by the knowledge that learning is learnable.

Now questions are beginning to arise:

  • What particular learning capacities does a student need to develop further?
  • How might we gain a picture of the current learning-power strengths of a group or class?
  • What information do we need in order to better personalise students' learning?
  • How can we gauge whether our efforts at coaching learning power are working?
  • How might we assess how learning power is developing over time?

TrackingLearning:On-line helps a school, its staff, and indeed its students not only to answer these questions, but to extend the language and ideas that they use to understand and build learning power.

What is TrackingLearning:On-line?

TrackingLearning:On-line contributes to the process of building learning power. It is a formative on-line tool offering a set of quizzes, with feedback that enables students to reflect on their current learning 'fitness'.

Students and teachers use ordinary web browsers for access.

What does TrackingLearning:On-line do?

  • Diagnoses students' current strengths in learning dispositions and capacities
  • Offers immediate, encouraging feedback to students
  • Stores and displays the progress of learning capacities over time
  • Allows teachers to record their perceptions of students' learning power and compare them with students' own

What can you use TrackingLearning:On-line for?

  • Use the analysed responses to guide and scaffold focused learning conversations between students and teachers
  • Help to establish a common language for learning to learn
  • Assess the development of students' learning power over time
  • Explore particular learning capacities across classes, groups, sets, years, or the whole school
  • Explore how the development of learning power relates to National Curriculum attainment
  • Inform teachers' planning for personalised learning
  • Increase students' engagement in improving their learning power
  • Shape the design of induction programmes for new students, e.g. Year 7

Features for students

Quizzes

A bank of short, student-friendly quizzes that explore students' perceptions of how they approach learning. The quizzes are organised in two tiers:

  • Tier 1 contains one quiz of twenty questions ranging across all four learning dispositions - resilience, resourcefulness, reflectiveness and reciprocity. It explores a student's overall learning fitness.
  • Tier 2 contains four quizzes of twenty questions each. Each quiz covers one of the four dispositions, and the learning capacities that make it up. The questions address a mix of the student's behaviours, beliefs and preferences. These explore in more depth how students are using their learning capacities.

Feedback

When they have completed a quiz, students receive immediate, encouraging feedback. This gives them a non-judgemental picture of their current learning fitness, and pointers to areas that could be exercised for greater strength. The feedback is careful not to lock students into a limiting view of themselves.

Students can print out their results for use in learning conversations with their teachers, and can view previous results for comparison.

Presentation

The quizzes use the metaphor of learning fitness, likening each disposition to a group of learning muscles which can be made to grow stronger through exercise.

There is a choice of graphical displays for the quizzes.

Features for staff

Staff use ordinary web browsers to access TrackingLearning:On-line, via a separate web-site interface from the one that students use.

Access to student responses

At any time after students have completed a quiz, staff have access to the results. They can:

  • View individual student responses in detail
  • View summarised results for individual students, both as the feedback that the student sees, and as simple numerical indicators of learning dispositions or learning capacities
  • View results averaged for groups of students
  • Export responses and results, to allow more specific analysis, or for inclusion in reports or school management records

Input of staff perceptions

Staff can record their perceptions of their students' current learning behaviours, against the same quiz sets, and can compare these with the students' own responses.

Administration and control facilities

TrackingLearning:On-line includes intuitive, easy-to-use ways to manage the school's use of the system. Staff can:

  • Define categories of student grouping, for administrative and analysis purposes (e.g. class, tutor group, subject); and particular groups within these (e.g. Mr Jones's Year 5 class, Mrs Wesley's tutor group)
  • Input and amend student details (on-line, or by importing data files)
  • Control the timing of students' access to do the quizzes; including the ability to have, for example, a class of thirty students do a given quiz as three subgroups of ten at a time

Licence and Price

A licence runs for twelve months from registration.

  1. The price starts at £275 + VAT for up to 100 student users
  2. and increases by £25 + VAT for each additional 30 users.

Purchase is eligible for eLearning Credits.

eBLP Activity Bank