Assessing Student Learning

There is a Facebook post running the circuit this week in which Arthur Costa, Emeritus Professor at California State University Sacramento (one of my alma maters) is quoted as saying,

“What was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure. So now we measure how well we taught what isn’t worth learning.”

Costa is known for coauthoring Habits of Mind: A Developmental Series in 2000, which has been a guide for some who believe the 16 skills or habits he describes will result in positive outcomes for individuals and society. For more about Costa, check out these sites:

http://www.chsvt.org/wdp/Habits_of_Mind.pdf

http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108008/chapters/Describing-the-Habits-of-Mind.aspx

Costa seems to me to have a valid point. Having been in the field of education 20 years, I have seen our nation’s ongoing struggles with meaningful assessment of student achievement.

As an idealistic student teacher in 1993, I was enthusiastic about the gains we would all make as we all embrace “authentic assessment” through ongoing portfolios that would follow students through their educational careers. Educators would work together to increase our objectivity as we scored portfolios with rubrics, and we would develop a truly accurate picture of each child’s strengths and weaknesses of students, as well as their progress toward worthwhile goals. Teachers and schools would be able to review the portfolio and take each child forward from his or her current level.  We were changing the world, almost as significantly as the flower children of the ‘60s! But then I was faced with reality…

Teachers had neither training nor time to create or maintain gigantic folders full of student work. Portfolios would literally be huge file folders full of paper, as we were not yet in the Digital Age. 

Even if we wanted to try some authentic assessments, we were still required to prepare our students for statewide, standardized assessments. Shortly thereafter, our nation was saddled with No Child Left Behind, and any efforts to find students’ talents were abandoned as we prepared them all for more and more objective, standardized testing.

And here we are now, with NCLB slinking away into the shadows and computer servers bursting with data, and the possibility of the movie Idiocracy becoming our reality haunts me. 

We are experts at taking tests now, as evidenced by the multitude of quizzes on Facebook: Which Disney princess are you? What’s your true nationality? What is the title of your future autobiography?

But have those tests truly reflected student learning? Perhaps… It appears that as a whole, our nation has learned very few effective life skills over the past 20 years. We need “life hacks” just to figure out how to cross out errors and organize keys.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/100-life-hacks-that-make-life-easier.html

Our academic knowledge is abysmal, as evidenced by the fact that parents need special math classes to help their first graders with homework.

http://www.oakdale.k12.ca.us/ENY_Hmwk_Intro_Math

http://commoncore.org/parents

More importantly, has this focus on objective, standardized testing IMPROVED our learning? Judging by the fact that everyone is emphasizing the four Cs in 21^st century learning, I would say we have regressed. We are now shouting from the rooftops the need for communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity… presumably because we got so very far away from them while we busily bubbled in test sheets.

My Technology-Infused Classroom

My technology-infused classroom looked like this at the beginning of the school year:

Students interact with the SmartBoard daily

Students use desktop computers to publish writing

Teachers use the SmartBoard too

Students collaborate on projects

Two weeks ago we added a Smart Table to our classroom:

We are definitely the beneficiaries of good funding. 

It may not be easy to see in the photos, but students in my technology-infused classroom are often solving problems. They may be researching answers on the Internet or sounding out words as they read books on www.Raz-kids.com like this:

or figuring out how to shrink an image to fit into a presentation. Thus we are practicing critical thinking and focusing on real-world problems every day.

Even though visitors might view a technology-infused classroom as a chaotic, random setting, organization is very important in technology-infused classrooms. Teachers need to set up ways for students to save and find their work. You must consider space and blocking. You will need to create small pockets or work areas for students to collaborate, communicate, and sometimes to work independently. To get ideas for setting up such a classroom, I recommend an online search for “primary classroom set up” to any teacher, even those not teaching primary grades.

One of my student's saved work so far this year

In addition to considering the placement of furniture and equipment, prepare yourself for the SOUNDS of a technology-infused classroom. There are great sounds, like student recording themselves reading books to practice fluency and expression. And there are the not-always-appreciated sounds of LOTS of different things going on at once. As my partner teacher recently said, “Their energy level goes down dramatically when they're given…gasp…worksheets...” If you like a quiet, orderly classroom, it will be a challenge for you to embrace the technology-infused classroom. But you need to grab some earplugs and jump in anyway.

Visual Literacy: Seeing is... Thinking!

A filmstrip projector, with filmstrip

When I was in elementary and middle school, teachers would occasionally show us filmstrips. The teachers hated to do this because it meant lights off and extra effort to make sure we learned something from the visual images, so they could not monitor the hooligans who made jokes and silly noises throughout the film.  Inevitably, someone fell asleep with the lights off, motivating many teachers to provide a pop-quiz the next day to make sure we paid attention. Is it this memory that prevents some teachers today from showing videos? Are we afraid that videos are a form of “cheating” or shortcut that will rob students of valuable learning experiences?

I think teachers who have similar memories to mine many need to rethink our stance on using videos in our instruction. This video about the importance of visual literacy is powerful and inspiring. Perhaps it is a disservice to our students NOT to include video and other imagery these days.

Last week I read an article by Seglem and Witte (2009) about using visual literacy to boost writing skills and have been raving to my classmates and colleagues about the ideas in it.

The part that keeps rolling around in my head addresses how we teach students to write research papers. We tell them to “use your own words” without really giving them tools or time to process their research, so we end up with student who carefully follow our steps for writing loosely plagiarized reports. Seglem and Witte describe “collages,” a method of using visual literacy to get kids to critically think about the information they've found so they can find their own meaning and make connections as they report out. I want to follow their suggestion of having students use magazine photos to create collages on index cards (instead of taking notes) after reading a resource from the library or the Internet. Students must access prior knowledge and make personal connections as they seek images that will express the message they’re trying to get across. These index cards with one idea per card can then be organized in whatever makes sense to the student as s/he writes his actual report. The images remind the student of the ideas, but not of the specific words and phrasing they already read, so it is easier to “put it in your own words.”

Seglem and Witte are my new heroes; they describe four other brilliant schemes for using visual literacy to improve writing skills that I want to steal also. You may need access to ERIC or another university library service to access their article, or you may be able to get it from a local library through this link: http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/44993768/you-gotta-see-believe-it-teaching-visual-literacy-english-classroom Get it! Read it! Do it!

Having access to the Internet makes it so much easier to incorporate visual literacy into everyday lessons, and I love taking a four-minute break while students gaze raptly at an instructional video. Instead of berating myself for sitting down on the job, perhaps I need to pat myself on the back for providing students with skills they need for this world we’re living in now. And maybe it’s okay to let the play some online math games too!

But my favorite way to use Internet in the classroom is for collaboration. I love Google Apps and Wikispaces and the potential for communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication that these offer. Now if I can just convince my colleagues that using technology is not taking away from instructional time, but is enhancing it...

Teachers collaborating with Wikispaces

It's About Time: Why a Variety of Instructional Strategies is Essential to Learners

As a child I was an avid fan of Little House on the Prairie and was enthralled by the school scenes. The idea of carrying lunch to school in a pail, of sitting on a bench at the front of the class with no desk to hide behind, and of standing up to recite memorized passages all seemed so catastrophically embarrassing to me. I was a painfully shy student who was grateful for the 70s and 80s teaching strategies that allowed me to quietly do my own work and never interact with other students. I rarely interacted with teachers either, even when inequitable access to technology negatively affected my social studies grade in sixth grade: my family did not buy newspapers, so I was unable to cut out weekly current events and write summaries of them.

Instructional strategies have flourished since my days in American public schools, and I believe our students are the beneficiaries. I might have blossomed with an elementary teacher who used a bit of behaviorist theory and gave me positive reinforcement for being a good student; instead I learned that being good was expected and did not make me particularly special. I wonder how my life would be different if my middle school teachers had used cooperative learning techniques and forced me out of my shell, as shown in this video.

Perhaps if a high school teacher had implemented some constructivist theories and allowed me to pursue my own interests or create my own meaning, I would not have skipped so much of my senior year that one more absence would have meant graduating a year later. 

This little guy with the abacus accurately represents the difference between my school experience (top) and that of my children (bottom). Students in the 21^st century know themselves as learners, and teachers implement various instructional methods to address their needs. This is so much better than the one-size-fits-all model I saw on TV and experienced to a lesser degree.

As a first grade teacher, I helped my student discover their preferred learning styles using the site http://www.bgfl.org/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks1/ict/multiple_int/what.cfm. This bit of technology helped me develop lessons to meet the needs of all learners in my classroom. Thanks to the abundance of technology available in my school, I can direct visual learners to videos, tutorials, and mind-mapping programs while kinesthetic learners can practice skills with educational games and simulations. Musical learners can listen to music while working on tasks and can use rhymes and songs to learn facts. Technology is an essential tool for implementing the various instructional strategies to our diverse population of learners. 

Photo credit: http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/old-and-new-math