Tag: learning

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.

Learning Differences that Matter

Cedar Riener and Daniel Willingham expand on the argument (previously discussed here and here) that learning styles do not exist. They do not, however, deny that different people learn differently and this needs to be taken into account in teaching.

Real differences that affect learning:

  • Different talents: “[W]hether we call it talent, ability, or intelligence, people vary in their capacity to learn different areas of content.” (ᔥ Riener and Willingham, 2012). Some of this is probably genetic, while some of it is probably due of nuture., which leads to:
  • Different interests: Students with an interest in a subject are more motivated to learn and will learn it faster.
  • Different background knowledge: Student retain more then they are able to fit new knowledge into an existing mental scaffolding.
  • Learning disabilities: There are neurological differences that result in things like dyslexia that have a strong influence on how some students learn.

Riener and Willingham argue that while students do have preferences for ways they learn (visual vs. auditory vs. kinesthetic etc.) these have no real effect students’ learning. Information should be presented in ways that are appropriate to the content:

If I were to tell you “I want to teach you something. Would you rather learn it by seeing a slideshow, reading it as text, hearing it as a podcast, or enacting it in a series of movements,” do you think you could answer without first asking what you were to learn—a dance, a piece of music, or an equation? While it may seem like a silly example, the claim of the learning styles approach is that one could make such a choice and improve one’s learning through that choice, independent of content.

We all agree that some kids show more interest in math, some start their education more interested in poetry, and others are more interested in dodgeball. The proof that the learning-styles theorist must find is that for some sort of content—whether it be math, poetry, or dodgeball—changing the mode of presentation to match the learning styles helps people learn. That evidence has simply not been found.

— ᔥ Riener and Willingham, 2012: The Myth of Learning Styles in Change, The Magazine of Higher Learning.

Finally, they assert that, “it is a waste of time to assess learning styles rather than, for instance, background knowledge.”

Still, even with learning styles taken out of the equation, it seems to me that presenting information in multiple modes remains beneficial. It forces the teacher to approach the subject matter from different perspectives, and presents students with multiple opportunities to encounter information in a way that would fit into their existing knowledge scaffolding. However, it is useful to recognize that we don’t have to force ourselves too fit content into incongruent learning styles (although that in itself might be a useful mental exercise for the teacher, or a good way for students to demonstrate that they can apply their knowledge into other domains).

↬The Dish

Schools kill creativity

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’re not going to be creative. But when do we give kids the chance to be wrong. Ken Robinson’s argument in this TED talk, is that schools are designed to produce workers good at automatic tasks and bad at creative, heuristic ones. This may have worked well during the industrial revolution, but is painfully deficient in the modern world. It’s the same argument made by Daniel Pink in Drive.

Robinson is a most entertaining speaker, so the presentation is a joy to watch. It’s a great reminder that we need to foster some risk-taking, and students need to know that sometimes the ultimate consequence of failure is learning.

Multiple Intelligences

The cycle of work. Within each subject area there are different types of assignments designed to provoke learning in many different styles.

The lessons, the individual works, the different group works, the reading; they’re all set up in this elaborate combination so that different students with different learning styles can get the information they need in the way that’s most meaningful to them. But the students also get to experience a wide range of learning styles so that they can become acclimatized to the different styles while actually figuring out which ones work best for them.

The logic behind this approach comes from Howard Gardner’s ideas on multiple intelligences. He argues that we have aptitudes for different ways of learning, and learning is easier and faster if students take advantage of their preferred learning styles. Whether we acquire these preferences through nature or nurture is an intriguing question, but by middle school I’ve found that it does not take long to recognize that some students have rather strong preferences.

[T]here exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early ‘naive’ theories of that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. – Gardner (1993) p. xix.

The learning intelligences have been defined in a number of different ways (see Smith, 2008 and BGfL for examples). We parse them like this:

  • Linguistic intelligence – learning from the written word or hearing words (auditory).
  • Logical/Math – using numbers and logical reasoning.
  • Bodily-kinesthetic – learning from doing.
  • Visual/Spatial – emphasizes images and relationships in space.
  • Interpersonal – learning from/with others.
  • Intrapersonal – introspective learning.
  • Musical – rhythm is important
  • Naturalistic – comprehending of the environment.

I prefer students to discover their preferred intelligences via the variations convolved into the curriculum, however, the BGfL has an online, multiple intelligences test that I’ve used in the past. However, as with standardized tests, you don’t want to stereotype students or have them stereotype themselves. All the intelligences interact. Different challenges force us to take different approaches, using different combinations of our intelligences to best effect. As always, a growth mindset is best. With their mental plasticity, adolescence is the best time to explore different learning approaches.

Sleep makes us better people

In researching the benefits of sleep to assist a student interested in sleep deprivation, I came across the work of Matthew Walker from UC Berkley. His papers have some rather intriguing titles. One of them (Walker and van der Helm, 2009), called “Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing” finds that lack of sleep seems to result in us retaining more negative memories and emotions, and reduces our ability to act rationally (Yoo et al., 2007):

[S]tudies indicate that prior sleep loss significantly impairs the ability for effective next-day learning of new experiences across numerous species. Furthermore, sleep loss appears to disrupt the learning of different affective categories to varying extents, potentially creating an imbalance in negative emotional memory dominance. – Walker and van der Helm, (2009)

Walker’s also synthesized the current research on sleep and finds sleep is important in other types of memory as well. During sleep we organize information in our brains, finding context for the data we absorbed while awake, which is why we remember things better after we sleep.

[S]leep serves a … role in memory processing that moves far beyond the consolidation and strengthening of individual memories and, instead, aims to intelligently assimilate and generalize these details offline. – Walker (2009)

Indeed, organizing information into mental schemes is one of the keys to learning.

Walker’s bibliography is a treasure trove of information about research on the affects of sleep on our emotional and intellectual well being. These articles will, however, probably need a lot of translation for the typical middle schooler. For that reason, using the press reports on this work would be a much better alternative for students.