Information is important! Data about student behavior is so helpful when deciding how best to help our students.
But, to be honest, when I am in the middle of teaching, or helping other students, it is hard to stop everything and record student behavior.
Google Forms makes data collection a breeze!
First, make a separate Google Form for each student you are progress monitoring. Using the checkbox option, make a list of the items you are monitoring.
The example below is for behavior. If you are trying to gather data about a student’s behavior, make a check box list of the common behaviors you want to track.
It can work the same way for sills or learning goals.

Then put a link to the form ON YOUR PHONE. This is really the magic of using the Google Form, because you always have your phone with you.
You are walking down the hall with your class and JP yells out an obscenity? Pull up the form on your phone and record it right then and there. A timestamp will automatically be generated, so when you go in and look at your data you will be able to see the patterns in behavior.
To see the data, click the ‘responses’ tab at the top. Then click the green square near the top right corner of the screen. This will generate a spreadsheet with all of your data entry!
Just what you need, data to better help your students!
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I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. I have almost 200 students. This is appealing to me for tracking participation and interpersonal/interpretive skills in my Spanish classes. To see their scores individually if I put several items they are each scored on for those skills, would I be able to see each of them individually on the spreadsheet? Or would I need every single one of them individually created?
Lindsey,
That is a lot of students! You would not necessarily have to make a different Google Form for each student. If you made one form (maybe one for each class?) and the first question can be Student Name, then questions for each skill you are assessing. The only trick will be when you go to the spread sheet, each entry you make will have its own line on the sheet – in order to group responses by student you can click and highlight the entire column of student names, right clip and select ‘A-Z Order” This will put the students in order, same names grouped together.
Maybe you can do a new Google Form each week in order to keep your spreadsheets from getting so large that they are overwhelming.
Do you think that would work for what you need?
How can you separate out the weeks for progress? new at this!
Hello Laurie! That is a great question. When you set up your Google Form, include a place to add the Date – when you select the question type, at the bottom of the list is a ‘Date’ and ‘Time’ – then when you pull up a spreadsheet of the data from the form you can organize it by date, or by time (sometimes it is the time of day that will trigger a particular behavior for a student). Do this by clicking the column for date or time and organizing it from A-Z. To make things more visual, you can highlight the spreadsheet data for each week in a different color (select the rows, choose a color with the paint can). To isolate a data set, like a single week, highlight the rows you want, copy them, and paste those rows into a new spreadsheet or a new page of the same sheet (click the + button at the bottom left corner of the screen). I hope that helps!