Academic Monitoring Strategies
Academic monitoring strategies are steps taken to help students achieve their desired academic goals. For the process to succeed, it requires the efforts of both teachers and students. With teachers, they need to give firm guidelines on appropriate study methods while the students are required to do what the teachers expect of them. An example of this is completing and presenting neat and accurate assignments in time.
Teachers should ensure that students account for their mistakes. By doing this, the students will learn that whatever work they are doing is totally for their academic benefit. Teachers may also seek to liaise with parents to ensure that students adhere to the set rules. This would be in providing a peaceful environment for the completion of assignments at home. The main strategies that can be applied to learners by teachers for an efficient monitoring process include; appropriate decision making with good corrective acts,setting achievable goals, instruction efficiency and monitoring and also ensuring timely actions in the monitoring process.
To ensure that students have efficient knowledge of lesson material, the teachers must demonstrate ability to inaccurate decision making and taking the best action aimed at correcting the learners’ behavior. When giving an assignment, the teacher must ensure that the students are well conversant with the topic at hand and that the timeline for completing the work is reasonable.
The decision on what type of homework is done should not be influenced by students’ opinions but must be based on the teacher’s conscience. Students who disobey the teacher’s instruction of timely submission of the work must get severe corrective measures. The process also entails the students being aware of how the work is meant to benefit them. It extends to the teacher advising the parents on how to monitor the students while at home.
The second strategy involves provision of opportune monitoring. This entails monitoring all student’s work to ensure they are making progress in class. The teacher should walk around the class-tackling problems from individual students. This strategy ensures that problems of individual students are identified and solved on the spot. There is also the possibility of identifying a common problem in class for the teacher to lay more emphasis on.
The teachers can also assist the learners by setting up realistic academic standards based on their capabilities. When issuing assignments, the model of presentation or result expectations and format should be similar to what the students have covered in class. Given assignments should not have extended deadlines nor the standards relaxed unless there is a valid reason. To increase motivation in the topic under discussion, the teacher should always communicate in an interesting way to motivate the students.
In monitoring the learners to understand the lesson material, the teacher should ensure validation of the instruction to the students. The instruction can be changed depending on issues cropping up in the learning process.This means asking the class questions on the discussion topic. If there is no positive response, this may mean the topic has not been understood calling for a repeat of the same. The approach will also entail usage of evaluation forms to enable record-keeping on the monitoring progress.
It must be noted that for all the monitoring strategies to succeed, the teachers must realize that they acquire as much information about each student as possible. This would take identifying those who are hardworking, lazy ones, those ready to move ahead, or those who need re-teaching to understand better. In this way, the students will be sorted out and dealt with individually based on their needs. There is need for a corrective action in the system to benefit the students. On the other hand, good monitoring actions will enable the teacher to uphold enthusiasm in their work as effectual teaching may not be easy all the time and teachers need a reminder that their energy is yielding some fruits in the students’ academics.
Adoption of an efficient monitoring system for students with assignment difficulties can result in tremendous benefit to the students in terms of academic performances. With good instructional programs, the student will inculcate positive attitude in his work. Findings also show that better performances in school are directly attributed to positive attitude in the learning process and that failure occasionally comes from negative mindset in learning especially at the elementary school level.
In the case of students, the first academic monitoring approach would be to diagnose their current and preferred performances as per the objectives selected. This enables the student to dedicate his time towards achieving the identified objectives. This strategy may include brainstorming on possible reasons that might be an obstacle towards achievement of their intended goals.
After the diagnosis, the student must develop Self-improvement Plan (SIP) then start undertaking corrective measures immediately with the help of a checklist. This includes attending all class sessions full time and consulting the teachers and colleagues in the difficulty areas immediately.
When there is a close interaction with the teacher, the student will no longer face any difficulty in their classwork. For an effective academic monitoring process in a class, teachers must develop effective decision-making capacity to identify the tailor-made corrective and instructional measures for each student based on their academic challenges.