Self-Reported Grades allows students to assess their performance against predetermined standard criteria. This can include assessing their own work and coming to conclusions about the path toward improvement, progress, and achievement, and supporting other students in connecting their learning to meaningful strategies for growth.

Self-verbalization is talking to oneself about intellectual tasks, focusing one’s attention, planning and responding to tasks, and utilizing self-reinforcement. Self-questioning is an evaluative process where students ask themselves helpful questions before, during, and after learning to check their understanding.

Small Group Learning is an instructional approach where students are grouped into smaller groups within the class to facilitate collaborative learning. Students work together and receive customized supports from the teacher to achieve a shared learning goal, but unlike cooperative learning, they may not necessarily have specific roles or tasks assigned to them.

Strong Classroom Cohesion promotes the sense that the teacher-to-student and student-to-student interactions are working toward positive learning goals. The class is perceived as fair, respectful and focuses on supporting all students in their learning.

Success Criteria are the standards by which the task or project will be judged at the end to decide whether or not it has been successful. They are often brief, co-constructed with students, aim to remind students those aspects on which they need to focus, and can relate to the surface (content, ideas) and deep (relations, transfer) successes from the lesson(s).

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Teacher Clarity relates to organization, explanation, examples and guided practice, and assessment of student learning. It can involve clearly communicating the intentions of the lessons and the success criteria. Clear learning intentions describe the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values that the student needs to learn.

Teacher Credibility is the student’s perception of their teacher. It is vital to learning, and students are very perceptive about knowing which teachers can make a difference. There are four key factors of credibility: trust, competence, dynamism and immediacy. Trust, as in believing in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of the teacher. Competence, being the teacher’s ability to teach successfully or efficiently. Dynamism, meaning the teacher is full of energy and excitement towards content and learning. And immediacy, regarding timely feedback and response to learner needs.

Teacher Estimates of Achievement are a teacher’s belief about the level a student is able to achieve based on past experiences. Teacher beliefs are influenced by past experiences such as responses to questions, observations, written work evidence such as assignments and tests, as well as how the student has reacted to increased challenges. These beliefs in turn affect the expectations teachers set for students, establishing next challenges for learning, informing placement and intervention choices, and influencing future instructional choices.

Teacher Expectations are demonstrated by the moment-to-moment interactions they have with the students they teach in thousands of almost invisible ways. Teachers give additional attention to provide more specific feedback and exhibit demonstrations of approval (for example, tone, nods, smiles) to students they expect to succeed. Teachers with high expectations have procedures in place that students manage themselves, communicate learning intentions and success criteria with the class, ask more open questions, manage behavior positively and proactively, make more positive statements and create a positive classroom climate, and set specific learning goals that are regularly reviewed with students.

Teacher-Student Relationships are effective when learners have healthy, sustained relationships with teachers that promote a sense of trust, belonging, safety and a sense that they matter.

Labeling students happens when teachers use terms associated with the ability, potential or behavior of the learners. These labels can be positive or negative and can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Labeling is seen as a factor that could explain differential achievement in schools by ability, class, disability, ethnicity or gender.

For learning to be effective, students must be able to make a spontaneous, unprompted, and appropriate transfer of a learning or problem-solving strategy from one context to another. This can be near transfer to new problems similar to prior instruction, or far transfer to new situations and domains.

Utah's Personalized, Competency-Based Learning Framework
The Utah State Board of Education has engaged with stakeholders from across the state to create Utah’s PCBL framework. The framework includes evidence-based practices and conditions for success that can be used to advance personalized, competency-based learning.