Formative and Authentic Assessment

Instead giving counterproductive, high-stakes exams, David Jaffee promotes formative and authentic assessment methods.

Formative assessment happens during learning, usually in the classroom. Students do something, like an assignment, and get immediate feedback on what they did. A teacher walking around from student to student or group to group, following what the students are doing and helping students identify which concepts they’re not getting, is a typical example of formative assessment.

Authentic assessments are assignments that are or mimic real-world problems, and require students to apply the stuff they should have learned to solving them. I’m using projects like the draining of a bottle and carpet friction experiments to assess if my students truly understand why they do algebra and calculus, and are able to apply the techniques they’ve learned.

Caveat: It is important to note, however, that being able to solve real-world problems requires some abstract thinking skills that adolescents are still developing. Yet, even though a lot of the basic learning in middle and high school consists of ingesting the language of the different fields of study — they type of thing that is easy to test — a more useful assessment is likely to be one that requires students to use their new vocabulary in written assignments, such as project reports and essays.

What’s Wrong with Traditional Education

Alison Gopnik points out the people first start to learn by exploration (the same way scientists do), and then learn to do things well by apprenticeship.

When we actually start to look at the fundamentals, it seems children learn by exploring—by experimenting, playing, drawing inferences …. that kind of exploratory learning isn’t just the purview of scientists but seems to be very, very basic. …The other kind of learning that we see, not so much in preschoolers but in school-age children, is what I call guided apprenticeship learning, where you’re not just exploring and finding out new things but learning to perform a skill particularly well.

— Alison Gopnik in Fillion (2011): In conversation: Alison Gopnik in MacLeans.

Kate Fillion’s great interview with Gopnik, a cognitive scientist, is worth the read.

The traditional way of thinking about learning at a university is: there’s somebody who’s a teacher, who actually has some amount of knowledge, and their job is figuring out a way of communicating that knowledge. That’s literally a medieval model; it comes from the days when there weren’t a lot of printed books around, so someone read the book and explained it to everybody else. That’s our model for what university education, and for that matter high school education, ought to be like. It’s not a model that anybody’s ever found any independent evidence for. [my emphasis]

— Alison Gopnik in Fillion (2011): In conversation: Alison Gopnik in MacLeans.

Update

EV, in the comments, recommends Allison Gopnik’s TED talk. It focuses on babies, but is a pretty good presentation.

(via The Dish)

To teach effectively, you need to speak the same language

An interesting research project has shown that the same parts of the brain light up when you’re telling a story as when you’re listening to the story. So much so, that you begin to anticipate and parts of the your brain actually light up before the same parts in the storyteller’s. And the greater the synchronization, the greater the recall of the story.

The researchers found considerable synchronization between Silbert’s brain-activation patterns and those of her listeners as the story unfolded. For example, as Silbert spoke about her prom experience, the same areas lit up in her brain as in the brains of her listeners. In most brain regions, the activation pattern in the listeners’ brains came a few seconds after that seen in Silbert’s brain. But a few brain areas, including one in the frontal lobe, actually lit up before Silbert’s, perhaps representing listeners’ anticipating what she was going to say next, the team says. – Balter, 2010

That’s fascinating enough, but the control of their experiment was to have listeners listen to a story in a language they did not know. There was not the same synchronization. This means, if we extrapolate a little, that the amount of language comprehension determines how much you learn from a conversation, or hearing a story, or listening to a lecture, or even for understanding a set of oral instructions.

So if you want students to remember something you need to speak in their language. Language here refers not just to English versus Russian or whatever, but speaking using common idioms that the student is, like, you know, familiar with.

Games and literacy (from Powell's Books) — What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee

James Paul Gee has written a lot about this type of communication, and what it means for learning. He argues that meaning is situated, that is, how we understand something that is said to us depends a lot on our previous history and experiences. The most effective communication only really occurs within communities that have shared the same, or similar, experiences.

We are as teachers, of course, trying to expand student’s ability to use language, and introduce them to the language of different communities. But we should probably pay attention to how we speak in different contexts, and speak in their language when we want them to really remember something.