Learning Analytics in a Band Classroom

In my experience in my practicum classroom, my cooperating teacher uses a lot of data to make decisions in her classroom. Being a band class, you cannot exactly track grades to track understanding. A student could fully understand the music in front of them, but not have access to a way to come to a concert. Their concert grade would probably be low, because they cannot attend, but their understanding would not reflect that grade. I feel like this probably shines through in other ways for other classes, but I personally only have this perspective.

My cooperating teacher instead sends out surveys to the students. Once every couple weeks, the students spend one class period filling out a Google form about how they feel about their participation in class as a whole and their understanding of the individual pieces being worked on in class. I value this way of "evaluating", because I feel like it honors the core reason for learning analytics.. to help our students!

With a Google form, it will automatically show you a chart of some sort for every question you ask, so you can see that maybe 60% of your class feels like they understand on piece, but only 25% feels like they understand another piece.  This is valuable information! Now you would know that more work is needed on the second piece. My cooperating teacher also sometimes breaks up the song into the major sections in these forms. For example, one question would be "Rate your ability to play measures 22-30 in Stars and Stripes Forever" and the students can rate their ability to play every section of the piece.

The responses to these forms are always insightful, and according to my cooperating teacher, the answers always align with what she sees in class. If she has a student who does not participate, that student is honest in the form submission. The same applies to any other student and their participation level, they are fairly honest. The form also comes off less like an evaluation and more like a survey, so it takes that pressure off of the students to feel like they have to be doing everything perfectly.