Student academic progress ensures students are learning the material and leads to student success. An effective teacher must be able to help students master the content knowledge. Measuring student academic progress is crucial to gauge how effective the lessons are in helping students develop the content knowledge. Student academic progress can be achieved by setting goals, providing students with activities and assignments to reinforce information, and evaluating students with a record of pupil learning.
Setting Goals
Setting achievable goals is necessary for student success because it gives the students a target to strive for and reach. 
To ensure goals are attainable, it is important to take the students’ academic levels into consideration; teachers can even get students more involved in the learning process by having the students come up with goals. The state’s curriculum guideline can be a helpful tool when creating and executing goals. In my lessons, I use the SOLs to create goals and objectives to guide the unit.
Assignments
Having students complete a variety of assignments are a great way for teachers to measure students’ academic progress. Assignments may include small projects, worksheets, graphic organizers, and quizzes. Teachers can collect data from the assignments to see if student learning is taking place. Teachers should use a variety of activities and assignments to evaluate students; differentiating the assignments makes it easier to incorporate multiple intelligences and meet students’ diverse academic levels. During student teaching, I used a formative assignment where students came up with scenarios where natural selection could take place. I was able to use this assignment to see how well students were understanding the concepts of natural selection.
Record of Pupil Learning
Effective teachers must be able to show evidence of their students’ improvement and ability to meet goals and objectives. Teachers can gather this data by 
assessing the assignments students complete based on the objectives and content knowledge. For any given unit, pretests, assignments, and final projects/tests can be analyzed to show student growth. I created a record of pupil learning based a pre-test and post-test for my evolution unit.