I work with students a lot on goal-setting (see The Best Posts On Students Setting Goals) and share several related lesson plans in my books.

One of the studies I’ve written about discusses the value of students tracking their own progress. Here’s what I wrote about it:

Easy to Visualize Goal Is Powerful Motivator to Finish a Race or a Task is a report on a study that found it’s effective for people to actually see that they are making progress towards making their goal. I think that reinforces the importance of having students regularly reflect on how they are doing, and to, as the researchers suggest, even consider writing or drawing some kind of graph showing their progress. I’m not talking about some big public achievement chart and gold stars here — just one that students keep for themselves.

Following-up on the most recent goal-setting sheet they’ve completed, and reflecting the results of that recent recent study, tomorrow I’m giving students this goal tracking progress sheet (clicking on the link will download a copy).

They’ll pick two of their most important goals and track their progress each week between now and the end of the school year. I’ll have them glue the chart in their notebooks.

I’m very open to ideas on how to make this work better, and I’ll keep readers posted on how it goes.