The skill of "bubble guessing" as Diane Ravitch recently called it during a lecture at my alma mater, is not very in demand in the working world. Yet that is what our schools have as their central focus because of the current requirements from our government. In this session of my Capstone course I am being tasked with looking at assessment.
For those of you who are uneducated about the ways of education, their are two basic kinds of assessment. The first is the one that most people think of when they think of assessment and it is called summative assessment. These are things like end of unit tests, the SAT, final exams, and even quizzes. The second kind of assessment is called formative. Formative assessments are not supposed to count in the gradebook. They are assessments made as students work towards mastery of information and skills.
According to Catherine Garrison & Michael Ehringhaus in the article, "Formative and Summative Assessments in the Classroom," “Summative assessments happen too far down the learning path to provide information at the classroom level and to make instructional adjustments and interventions during the learning process.” Now I disagree with the first part of their statement about summative assessments not providing information at the classroom level. I think they do provide valuable feedback on a teachers instruction. I do agree with their point that summative assessments happen too late for the teacher to do anything about it. At this point most teachers are moving on. If things are really bad they might reteach certain concepts. If only they had used better formative assessments they might have recognized their errors earlier and prevented the reteaching in the first place.
Our same authors argue that formative assessment should not count in the gradebook because when the early formative assessments, which happen when students are still grasping concepts, are averaged with the higher scores that come towards the end of an instructional time period the resulting average does not adequately reflect the students learning. Particularly if that student demonstrates strong mastery of a subject by scoring well on the final formative assessment.
So what makes good formative assessment? According to our authors it is descriptive assessment aka giving students lots of feedback. The authors suggest goal setting, observations, questioning strategies, self and peer assessment, and student record keeping as some ways to promote formative assessment. My issue with descriptive/formative assessment is that it can be very time consuming in an environment that is seriously pressed for time.
I like both kinds of assessment and when done correctly they can paint an excellent picture of a students actual academic achievement.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Thoughts on Session 2 of my Capstone Class
Project Based Learning is a great instructional idea. You start a class with a big idea or question which gets students thinking about their own questions. You provide opportunities for students to research their questions and then get the students to take what they learned and create a product for public consumption. My issue with this kind of project is that the school does not have nearly enough technology based resources to pull this off with every teacher.
The struggle I am having right now with this program is that I don't have a good understanding of how to teach at the elementary level yet. I don't know what these students can do. It makes it really hard for me to plan a lesson, not knowing what they are capable of learning. My formal training is at the secondary level and this is my first year at the elementary level.
I like the curb cut analogy being applied to technology instruction in the classroom. When curb cuts were introduced for individuals with handicaps it also benefited other people. In education, accomodations designed to help students with learning disabilities also can benefit the other students in the class. I checked out the National Center for Universal Design and Learning and watched their introduction video. The ideas sound good, but once again I didnt come across any practical applications for the classroom outside of closed captions on videos.
As I dive deeper into UDL I am recognizing value, but at the same time recognizing some of the immense hurdles to creating lessons of this nature. In parituclar the resource of time. To truly design a good UDL lesson you need to do things in triplicate in various forms with various components. The examples mentioned at http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/chapter4_4.cfm are just too time consuming for a regular teacher to design, day in and day out. Over time, say the course of a few years, I think a teacher could get to this point in their lesson planning. I like the idea of selecting tools that have built in flexibility. The article also argues that digital tools, just by being digital, have an inherent flexibility that other tools do not.
Another component of this lesson is Gardner's multiple intelligences. I am curious to know what the latest research is on this subject because I was under the impression that recent research has debunked some of Mr. Gardner's ideas on multiple intelligences. Multiple intelligences obviously ties in neatly with UDL as these two both get at the idea that lessons should be designed to engage a wide variety of student interests.
The struggle I am having right now with this program is that I don't have a good understanding of how to teach at the elementary level yet. I don't know what these students can do. It makes it really hard for me to plan a lesson, not knowing what they are capable of learning. My formal training is at the secondary level and this is my first year at the elementary level.
I like the curb cut analogy being applied to technology instruction in the classroom. When curb cuts were introduced for individuals with handicaps it also benefited other people. In education, accomodations designed to help students with learning disabilities also can benefit the other students in the class. I checked out the National Center for Universal Design and Learning and watched their introduction video. The ideas sound good, but once again I didnt come across any practical applications for the classroom outside of closed captions on videos.
As I dive deeper into UDL I am recognizing value, but at the same time recognizing some of the immense hurdles to creating lessons of this nature. In parituclar the resource of time. To truly design a good UDL lesson you need to do things in triplicate in various forms with various components. The examples mentioned at http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/chapter4_4.cfm are just too time consuming for a regular teacher to design, day in and day out. Over time, say the course of a few years, I think a teacher could get to this point in their lesson planning. I like the idea of selecting tools that have built in flexibility. The article also argues that digital tools, just by being digital, have an inherent flexibility that other tools do not.
Another component of this lesson is Gardner's multiple intelligences. I am curious to know what the latest research is on this subject because I was under the impression that recent research has debunked some of Mr. Gardner's ideas on multiple intelligences. Multiple intelligences obviously ties in neatly with UDL as these two both get at the idea that lessons should be designed to engage a wide variety of student interests.
Student Research in the Classroom
Again, my random thoughts on the reading Student Research in the Classroom
When students conduct research in the classroom using the Internet they need to be able to do the following:
Develop evaluation criteria (I am not really sure what the author means by this. My guess is that they want students to set up some boundries of what to search for and what to look at.)
Search for research sources (aka use a search engine. In following some of the discussions in the course, I have noticed a desire by many teachers to get students to move beyond Google or Yahoo in their search habits)
Evaluate those sources (very important skill for students)
Use the sources for a purpose (creation of something with information)
Give credit for the sources they use (proper citation)
So lets look at some Web 2.0 directories
Kathy Schrocks's Guide for Educators
A nice collection of tools, most of which I knew about.
Top 100 Web 2.0 Tools of 2009
Decent list of tools, but again I know about most of them.
Go 2 Web20
Huge list, but difficult to figure out what each listed item actually does.
I am thinking that I will use a wiki tool to serve as a the creative portion of the lesson and then I will need to find some kind of search enginge, maybe even use a portaportal for the information gathering portion.
When students conduct research in the classroom using the Internet they need to be able to do the following:
Develop evaluation criteria (I am not really sure what the author means by this. My guess is that they want students to set up some boundries of what to search for and what to look at.)
Search for research sources (aka use a search engine. In following some of the discussions in the course, I have noticed a desire by many teachers to get students to move beyond Google or Yahoo in their search habits)
Evaluate those sources (very important skill for students)
Use the sources for a purpose (creation of something with information)
Give credit for the sources they use (proper citation)
So lets look at some Web 2.0 directories
Kathy Schrocks's Guide for Educators
A nice collection of tools, most of which I knew about.
Top 100 Web 2.0 Tools of 2009
Decent list of tools, but again I know about most of them.
Go 2 Web20
Huge list, but difficult to figure out what each listed item actually does.
I am thinking that I will use a wiki tool to serve as a the creative portion of the lesson and then I will need to find some kind of search enginge, maybe even use a portaportal for the information gathering portion.
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