‘Myprogress’ App: Supporting and Tracking Learners Across Multiple Placements and Stakeh Home : Annual Conference 2014

Public Group Active 6 years, 8 months ago

Mon, Sep 1 2014, 4:40pm – 5:40pm

Description

Initial Teacher Education (ITE) has seen enormous changes in recent years. One of the most fundamental is the move from university based training to school directed training. As this transition takes place, ITE is faced with supporting teacher trainees through myriad training routes with reduced resourcing and increased accountability. Monitoring and tracking through paper based systems is difficult and time consuming and e-mail/web postings have not proved effective in large institutions. Effective, efficient systems to monitor and support trainees’ progress across different training placements and with many stakeholders are vital to ensure success for both trainees and training institutions. Stakeholders involved in a trainee’s progress clearly benefit from being kept informed ensuring any required intervention is purposeful and responsive.

This study into using advanced communication technologies was undertaken to discover the barriers, benefits, and opportunities in monitoring and tracking progress in comparison to the experience of existing systems. The system has been trialled in various clinical training courses in UK Universities (seewww.myknowledgemap.com/…/enhancing-assessment-med-web-final.pdf) but results are not yet published.

69 final year Secondary Teacher Education Trainees were recruited in October 2013 to engage on the ‘Myprogress’ scheme. The study was conducted over the length of the training programme of 30 weeks. 52 were Mathematics post graduate trainees of which 16 were School Direct. 16 were 3yr BSc in Science and 1 was a Modern Foreign Languages. ‘Myprogress’ was used to track and monitor trainees’ evidence of progress by deploying assessment-based tasks. Trainees uploaded evidence such as lesson plans, lesson activities, personal reflections and reports of incidents. These were automatically matched against the professions Teachers Standards competencies including subject knowledge, expectations, behaviour management, planning, differentiation and professional conduct. The administrator, partnership coordinator, academic tutor and school based mentor could view and respond to trainee’s progress and changes as they occurred. Throughout the study there was close collaboration between the university and the ‘Myprogress’ development company.

‘Myprogress’ easily collated and stored responses and comments to assessments. To date 39% of trainees submitted zero responses, 32% submitted 1-5 responses, 16% submitted 6-10 responses, 7% submitted 11-20 responses and 6% submitted more than 30 responses. The maximum number of responses submitted by a student was 76. These differing levels of engagement along with academic tutor and mentor opinion are being further analysed.

In many respects the app was a success and the possibilities and benefits were pointing the way to developing a more efficient and effective tracking system. Data from the system was easily collected through a variety of media providing a ‘rich’ portfolio of evidence. Formative feedback can be provided in a timely manner to support and enhance the trainee’s professional development. In terms of the broader ITE perspective, the system has the ability to connect across the range of training providers centralising monitoring and tracking to support progress with a flexibility that is not be dependent of future changes in initiatives; School Direct and SCITs (School Centered Initial Training) etc.

The paper will discuss the findings and implications and will make recommendations.