Tracking Progress with Google Sheets

My friend Andreas is a Spreadsheet Jedi. So when I saw this post of his where he created a progress tracking to-do list, I immediately wanted to try it. Since I am a new AP Chemistry teacher, using Andreas' system to track progress in AP Chemistry seemed like a great idea.

My AP Chemistry students have their first unit exam in my class next week. I wanted to help them self-assess and review, but I didn't want to make a typical high school review guide. AP Chemistry is, after all, supposed to take the place of a college class. AP Chemistry has something like 117 learning objectives, all keyed to six Big Ideas. I recently created a list of the learning objectives in Google Docs so I could use it for curriculum mapping and so forth. I used Andreas' tutorial and my list of learning objectives to create the AP Chemistry learning objectives tracker.

I shared the file with my students so they could each make their own copy. I suggested that they look at their lab and quiz scores from our first unit to deduce whether or not they have mastered an objective. If they have, they check the checkbox. When they do, the objective turns from yellow to green and the text is struck-through. The percent of mastered objectives is instantly calculated and displayed. Our goal will be for 100% mastery by AP Exam day.

This afternoon a fellow chemistry teacher (named Amy!) mentioned she would like to try something like this for her work with Standards Based Grading in AP Chemistry.

I think this could work the same way as my tracker except I would add a second column of checkboxes for "progressing" (or some other word that means not yet mastered but progress is being made). Conditional formatting could turn those rows one color while mastery could be a different color. The visual cue of different colors would be appealing and indicate progress.

Now we can all keep our goal in mind, while staying organized and focused. How are you tracking student achievements? How are your students tracking their mastery?