- Teachers should have a clear picture of what it is students should be learning, and students should be told what it is they will be required to learn (in the form of objectives, I can statements, learning targets, etc.).
- Teachers need to know what it looks like when students have mastered the learning. This means that assessments should be written or envisioned ahead of time so teachers can plan for instruction - to develop activities to help students reach mastery.
- Assessments aren't about tricking students (unless it's the ACT Science Reasoning test). Assessments are to see if students have learned what they were supposed to have learned, not trying to trip them up by assessing minutiae or putting questions on them they've never seen before all in the name of supposedly teaching critical thinking.
In other words, learning should be lined up with assessments and targets. What does this look like in a classroom? Here's an example of some objectives we're working on right now in Biology:
I can develop my own differences between the types of passive transport.
I can predict the direction of water movement into and out of cells.
What do these look like when students have mastered them? Kind of like this progress check (you call them quizzes, I call them progress checks) below:
Since this was the assessment, guess what we practiced in class? Writing differences and predicting water movement into and out of cells. We did that by doing some close reading, discussion, whiteboarding, and practice problems in groups where students checked their answers as they did them in order to get immediate feedback. I scored each objective on their progress check, letting them know where they were at on my continuum of understanding, as it were:
And then I made them fix their knowledge. They literally fixed it on their papers, and then they talked with a partner about what went wrong and how they made it right. And then, after some additional practice for those that needed it, I progress checked them again and scored them again.This means they got to see their improvement the next day. I really feel this increases student motivation, as well as helps foster a growth mindset. If students can see that working to fix their knowledge leads to improvement, why not?
On their final summative assessment, they will have to do exactly what was in their progress check only, obviously, with modified questions. I really believe that this prepares students much better for assessments - if students have a clear picture of the target, they are much more likely to hit that target. It's just that simple. It just makes sense. And it makes way more sense that throwing a ton of content at kids and then telling them to be prepared for anything and then asking about disconnected bits of concepts. How does that help students make coherent lines of learning in their brains? It doesn't.
It's not about tricking the students - it's about measuring how well they have learned what you want them to learn. To do that, you have to line up the learning with the objectives and the instruction.
