Learning progressions

The standards movement in education has yet to fulfill its promise and potential of raising the achievement level for all students. Instead of being used as benchmarks to measure the progress of student s, the standards, and the assessments used to measure them, have too often been co-opted into a ranking system. Learning progressions, used well, can help change the conversation in classrooms to what strategies can we use so all students meet the standards.

Learning progressions defined a sequence of learning steps with in a specific topic. An example of a learning progression with infants is first sitting up, then pushing themselves up, then crawling, then walking, then running. Every big concept has a similar series of progressive steps that need to be mastered before going on to the next one. Within any subject area there are only a handful of big or important ideas that someone should know. The rest are just details about that idea. It can certainly be debated what those big ideas are, but once there is a consensus around those big ideas a progression can be made of the concepts and skills that a student needs to master in order to understand each big idea can be established. Students must build their concept of any of the big ideas over time starting with less sophisticated concepts and skills gradually getting more and more sophisticated with those ideas.

The power of learning progressions within a big idea is the tools it provides teachers for differentiation and intervention for all students. Often the topics being studied in science class have a set of prerequisite knowledge for students to be successful, without this background students struggle with the topics. Learning progressions provide powerful tools to teachers by prescribing pre-assessments for students. These pre-assessments should test range of learning progressions within a big idea, so that teachers know where individual students are on the continuum of learning within that big idea. Armed with data from the pre-assessment teachers can then tailor their lessons to meet the students where they are instead of expecting the students to all be ready to tackle that topic in the same way. These same pre-assessments also let students know where they are and where they are expected to go.

Similarly, defined learning progressions also point to intervention strategies when a student is struggling. Students struggling in science classrooms often don’t have the prerequisite knowledge for where the teacher is. By understanding the learning progression of big ideas teachers can more easily fill in the gaps in student knowledge using a deliberate plan action rather than randomly trying different things for that student.

Publications such as AAAS’s Atlas of Science Literacy provide the map needed to start using learning progressions in Standards, Curriculum planning, and Instruction.