Making Sure Students Learn What's Taught
The Boston Globe
January 20, 2002
By Laura Pappano
The poetry by Robert Herrick was penned in the 17th century, but the subject-is it love or merely lust?-so engaged 10th-graders at the Media and Technology Charter High School in Brookline recently that students passionately argued both sides.
It seemed like the epitome of a successful English class - or was it?
At the end of class, when teacher Bob Hill gave students a "feedback" quiz, he discovered that half missed key points in the lesson, including the difference between mood and tone.
"Clearly," Hill said, "they don't have it down yet. It's very humbling."
Just because teachers teach doesn't mean students learn. The process is messy, riddled with starts, stops, and missteps. While Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has propelled educators to use different approaches to make an idea click, it's not enough to offer many entrances to the castle of knowledge. State standards and MCAS mean that teachers must know what students know - or don't know.
To find out, teachers have become classroom pollsters, asking for thumbs up or thumbs down as they teach a concept, giving mini-quizzes, peeking over students' shoulders, and analyzing classroom responses, facial expressions, even peer chatter.
Some teachers have always done this, but pressure to be sure children get it has made such assessments a key feature of the job and a focus of virtually all schools.
"It's such a change in the way we do business," said Shrewsbury assistant superintendent Michael Brandmeyer. "In the past, both teacher and parent assumed that assessment meant the test at the end of the chapter or unit. The more we learn about learning, we know you need to assess up front and that sets the baseline for what students know and understand."
Merle Berman, house administrator for Grade 8 at Pollard Middle School in Needham, said the school stresses the importance of re-teaching material. "We used to say, 'Oh the kids didn't get it, too bad,'" she said. "Now we say, 'The kids didn't get it, why?'"
Grant Wiggins, president of Relearning By Design, a not-for-profit educational research, consulting, and software development firm in Pennington, N.J., insists that teachers focus on how students might mislearn information, asking themselves, "If that's the Big Idea, what are students likely to misunderstand? What are the predictable difficulties students will have making sense of this?"
The notion of coming back to an idea many times - and from many angles - meshes with research on how we synthesize knowledge, suggesting it is not simply a crisp transfer of information.
Kurt Fischer, director of Mind, Brain, and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said research shows students may seem to understand a concept and use it correctly in class with the aid of a teacher, but be at sea on their own.
"When somebody first uses a concept, we assume, 'Oh, they've got it now.' But knowledge doesn't work like that," he said. "You need to keep using the concepts in different ways and applying them in different settings. It is a long-term process to build an understanding about literature, math, biology."
That's why Camille Harvey, fourth-grade teacher at the Miscoe Hill Elementary School in Mendon, constantly assigns students three- to four-minute essays asking them to explain what they just learned.
"A lot of times you might correct something and you might hand it back, but they never look at what you hand back," she said. "I want them to realize their mistakes so I try to give them feedback immediately."
Marie Brigham, a fifth-grade teacher in the same school, figured out from a class discussion Monday that three students weren't using a zero place holder for the five when multiplying 127 by 56. Immediately, Brigham planned to work one-on-one with those students to prepare them for a Thursday math test.
In Hill's English class, feedback quizzes - called the "student's ticket to leave" because they are handed to Hill as students exit the classroom - are a regular part of teaching.
His students say it helps them see quickly what they have learned incorrectly.
Quadriqua Watson, 15, of Jamaica Plain didn't realize she didn't understand a comma rule until she got it wrong on a quiz.
"I thought I was doing it right," Watson said. "But I failed the feedback quiz. The next day in class we went over it. If we were to have a test right now, I would know it."
Kevin Owens, 15, of Brighton said it helps to correct errors "before they get stuck in your head." Owens said the immediate quizzes also have another benefit: "Knowing you're having a feedback quiz at the end makes you pay attention in class."
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