Student progress requires that you keep track of the:
- exercises and knowledge covered.
- duration of training and any gaps.
- competencies gained by the students.
- outstanding issues with student performance.
Unlike some academic progress reports, much of flying is of the pass/fail variety. You are either competent and meet the standards or not. However many student progress reports attempt to apply multi-level rating schemes, that frankly are of little practical value, and are quite subjective. These schemes further suffer in that students are competent on the vast majority of items, and it is easy to lose track of the minority of poor performances.
I believe the student progress reports should be mainly checklists of material that should be covered in a curriculum where it is noted if students have been introduced to a topic, and essentially either rated as performing to standard or not past that point. The progress report should give information on the duration of training and any gaps, and leave space for instructor comments for those issues in need of highlighting.
Perhaps I am prejudiced in this regard as many of our students can be solo within a week. This means that teaching people to fly gliders isn't exactly rocket science and really might suffer from over analysis as regards student progress. That analysis is probably best applied to those students having difficulty rather than the majority who breeze through.
The sample card shown allows instructors to check off performance in three columns (Briefed, Needs Work, Approved), keep track of the day and month of up to 40 training flights and circle the runways used in the training program. It has a number of boxes for instructor comments to highlight issues.