Data Collection- Cycles Test

Last week, my students took a test on Cycles.  This included the water cycle, carbon and oxygen cycles, and the nitrogen cycle.  About a month ago, I talked about data collection in this post.  Collecting and posting data from each test is something new that I have been doing this year to give students an idea of where they stand in relationship to their peers.  I am working to get students to take more ownership of their grades and their school work.  Since this is the first year that I've done this, I've evolved with each test and quiz.  On the last quiz students took, over earthquakes, I showed them the relationship between quiz grades and students who completed the study guide verses students who did not complete the study guide.  I felt that this chart made quite an impact on students.  It really allowed them to see that completing the study guide really would help them in the end.

This time around, I was very happy that many more students completed the study guide for our Cycles test.  Students also showed a huge improvement on test grades in comparison to the earthquakes quiz as well.  I was also really happy about this, because I was able to compare the two graphs side by side for the students.
I added another bar to this graph, because I wanted to show students, not only the importance of completing the study guide, but also of actually taking some time to study the study guide (crazy concept for them!).  On the top of their tests, I had students jot down the number of minutes that they spent studying and I added a third bar to the graph, showing the relationship between grades and students who actually studied.  This third bar may not be perfectly accurate because I simply surveyed students, but I think it gives everyone a good idea.

I shared the graph with students yesterday, and passed tests back so that students could find which "bar" they belong in.  We also discussed this test with our earthquakes quiz, and my students had some really great feedback for me.  They mentioned that we played a review game (I have, Who has? Cycles) which the students really had fun playing and evidently this helped to review the material better than I thought.  When students took the earthquake quiz, we had been in the middle of some terrible weather, so I gave students time to work on the study guide in class instead of assigning it as homework.  Many of them felt that this hurt their grades because they completed their study guides in class and then did not take them home to study.  I was really proud of the great feedback that they were able to give regarding their learning.  I felt like a proud momma all day!  I am curious if anyone else is collecting/charting data for students in their classrooms... I would really love to get some ideas for the end of this year and next year.