Looking for the technical specs on the Status and Progress API Endpoint?

In this section:

• Status and Progress
  • Status
  • Progress
  • Work remaining
• Recommended use
  • For instructors
  • For students

Status and Progress

When learners work on an assigned goal in a Knewton-powered application, Knewton tracks both each learner’s status on the goal and a measure of the learner’s progress toward completing the goal. Knewton’s Status and Progress metrics were developed to provide actionable insights for learners and instructors at the target learning objective and goal level. They are available for scoped goals created with flexible completion criteria and learning objective targets, and they are incompatible with goals created by setting target score, as well as with deprecated metrics like expected score, taxon proficiency, and readiness forecast.

Status and Progress metrics capture learner performance within the context of a specified goal; if a student works on the goal’s content in the context of a different goal, the former’s Status and Progress metrics will be unaffected. For analytics targeting a learner’s overall performance on learning objectives across many goals, see the Predicted Score metric.

As detailed in the API reference, Status and Progress may be requested for a single registration or across all registrations associated with a learning instance. Payloads returned by the Status and Progress API contain several different fields descriptive of the student’s engagement with learning objectives and goals.

Status

Knewton’s status metrics provide qualitative descriptions of the current state of any learner’s work on a learning objective or goal. These descriptions are powered by the Knewton platform’s knowledge of the student’s past work on the goal and statistical modeling of the student’s knowledge state.

A goal may have one of five statuses:

• complete: the student has satisfied the goal’s completion_criteria for each of the goal’s target learning objectives.
• complete_max_work: the student has satisfied the goal’s completion_criteria.max_work_on_goal, though he or she may or may not have satisfied any target-specific completion criteria.
• in_progress: the student has begun working on the goal, and it is currently incomplete, but he or she does not appear to be struggling with the material.
• struggling: the student has begun working on the goal, and Knewton’s proficiency model estimates that there is a high likelihood that the student’s current knowledge state includes a weakness or gap on one or more of the goal’s target learning objectives.
• no_work: the student has not begun work on the goal.

Knewton also provides status metrics at the target learning objective level. They mirror the goal statuses above, except that it is not possible to complete an individual learning objective with any maximum amount of work. For each learning objective, the status metric may indicate:

• complete: the student has satisfied the goal’s completion_criteria for this learning objective
• in progress: the student has begun work on this learning objective, and it is currently incomplete, but he or she does not appear to be struggling with the material.
• struggling: the student has begun working on the learning objective, and Knewton’s proficiency model estimates that there is a high likelihood that the student’s current knowledge state indicates a weakness or gap on this learning objective.
• no_work: the student has not begun work on the learning objective.

Note that since statuses reflect a student’s current knowledge state, they may change several times over the course of a student’s engagement with a goal, especially if the student struggles temporarily with several different learning objectives. However, once the student reaches a status of complete_max_work on a goal or complete on a goal or learning objective, that status will no longer change, even if further events are submitted.

Progress

Knewton’s progress metrics provide a value between 0 and 1 meant to indicate the student’s progress toward completing a goal or target learning objective. The Knewton proficiency model calculates progress by comparing its model of the student’s knowledge state to the goal’s completion_criteria (its min_work_per_target, min_predicted_mastery, and max_work_on_goal, if present). As a result, progress follows some interpretable heuristics useful for product designers, students, and instructors:

• Progress starts with a value of 0, if the student has done no work on the goal or learning objective.
• (Not recommmended) If a goal’s only completion criterion is a max_work_on_goal, progress will increase linearly from 0 to 1 as the student submits answers.
• If a goal’s completion criteria include min_work_per_target > 0 and min_predicted_mastery, progress will generally increase over the first few (up to the value of min_work_per_target) questions on each learning objective. This reflects the notion that the student has engaged with the relevant material without yet mastering it. The increase in progress will generally be larger for correct answers, and smaller or slightly negative for incorrect answers.
• After the student answers enough questions per learning objective to satisfy the goal’s min_work_per_target, progress will increase when the student submits correct answers and decrease when the student submits incorrect answers.
• Progress reaches 1 when the student has satisfied all completion criteria for the learning objective or goal.

Once a student reaches a progress value of 1 on a goal or learning objective, that progress value will no longer change, even if further events are submitted that might change the proficiency model’s estimate of the student’s knowledge state. As a result, it is recommended to set meaningful completion_criteria in order for progress to be interpretable and actionable during a student’s learning experience.

Work remaining

Knewton’s Status and Progress endpoints also return work remaining estimates, the Knewton platform’s current estimate of how many questions the student will need to answer in order to complete a topic or goal. Work remaining estimates take into account the student’s work on the assignment as well as a notion of statistical uncertainty: if the student has done insufficient work so far to generate an informative estimate, the endpoint returns -1 instead of an estimated number of questions.

Recommended use

Status and Progress metrics are well-suited for use in a variety of instructor-facing and learner-facing application interfaces.

For instructors

Status and Progress metrics displayed for individual students can facilitate 1:1 tutoring, quickly indicating which content areas would be most worth instructor support. Knewton also offers an endpoint to request Status and Progress metrics for all registrations in a learning instance; the resulting data may be aggregated by a partner application into instructor dashboards to indicate an entire cohort’s performance on their assignments, helping instructors prioritize group review or lecture activities based on student mastery data.

For example, a partner product may choose to display an aggregation of all student statuses on a given assignment in a simple graphic, allowing instructors to assess the class’s overall performance and needs quickly in order to plan group interventions in class. The product can also display student-specific Status and Progress values, enabling instructors to intervene with particular individuals efficiently outside the context of the broader group.

For students

Displaying the learning objective and goal progress metrics helps orient the learner within an assignment, providing an indication of how much progress toward mastery the learner has made on each part of the assignment and the assignment as a whole. Displaying learning objective and goal statuses can also aid student metacognition, helping learners self-diagnose which learning objectives or goals they may currently struggle with in order to seek extra support.

For example, a partner application may opt to display the goal progress (shown here as “Assignment Mastery”) in the form of a progress bar, updating its value after each question the student answers. Additionally, the application may display separate indicators of learning objective progress, so the student can assess their current performance against each of the objectives that make up the assignment (here: circular progress icons next to learning objectives like “Determine the domain and range of a function”).

In this example, the partner application also displays topic work remaining estimates (for “Functions” and “Representing Functions”), so the student can manage their time concretely. If the partner application does not implement topics, it may still display goal-level work remaining estimates.