Learning progressions

By its very nature, learning involves progression. To assist in its emergence, teachers need to understand the pathways along which students are expected to progress. These pathways or progressions ground both instruction and assessment. Yet, despite a plethora of standards and curricula, many teachers are unclear about how learning progresses in specific domains. This is an undesirable situation for teaching and learning, and one that particularly affects teachers’ ability to engage in formative assessment.

The purpose of formative assessment is to provide feedback to teachers and students during the course of learning about the gap between students’ current and desired performance so that action can be taken to close the gap. To do this effectively, teachers need to have in mind a continuum of how learning develops in any particular knowledge domain so that they are able to locate students’ current learning status and decide on pedagogical action to move students’ learning forward. Learning progressions that clearly articulate a progression of learning in a domain can provide the big picture of what is to be learned, support instructional planning, and act as a touchstone for formative assessment.

Learning progressions define the pathway along which students are expected to progress in a domain. They identify the enabling knowledge and skills students‘ need to reach the learning goal as well as provide a map of future learning opportunities. Heritage, Kim, Vendlinski, and Herman (2009) explain that learning progressions are important to the development of progressive sophistication in skills within a domain. One view of learning progressions suggests that they are presented to students as a continuum of learning, accounting for different rates of learning (DeMeester & Jones, 2009). The rate of individual student‘s progress may vary along the learning progressions, but progressions should ultimately connect the knowledge, concepts, and skills students develop as they evolve from novice to more expert performances (Heritage, 2008). In this way, teachers and students should be able to ―see and understand the scaffolding they will be climbing as they approach‖ (Stiggins, 2005, p. 327) learning goals. In addition, if learning is derailed at any point, a teacher can identify this and adjust accordingly.

It is fair to say that if the standards do not present clear descriptions of how students learning progresses in a domain, then they are unlikely to be useful for formative assessment. Standards are insufficiently clear about how learning develops for teachers to be able to map formative assessment opportunities to them. This means that teachers are not able determine where student learning lies on a continuum, and know what to do to close the gap between current learning and desired goals. Explicit learning progressions can provide the clarity that teachers need. By describing a pathway of learning they can assist teachers to plan instruction. Formative assessment can be tied to learning goals and the evidence elicited can determine students’ understanding and skill at a given point. When teachers understand the continuum of learning in a domain and have information about current status relative to learning goals (rather than to the activity they have designed to help students meet the goal), they are better able to make decisions about what the next steps in learning should be.

This progression of learning allows teachers to position their students' learning, not only in relation to their current class(es) and the objectives for that cohort, but also in relation to prior and subsequent classes. Consequently, teachers are able to view current learning against a bigger picture of development. In terms of instruction, they are able to make connections between prior and successive learning. Also, information from formative assessment can be used to pinpoint where students’ learning lies on the continuum. Sometimes this will mean that teachers have to move backwards along the continuum, for example, if key building blocks are missing. Similarly, they might move learning further forward if some students are outpacing their peers. In both cases, the continuum allows them to make an appropriate match between instruction and the learners' needs.