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”Typically, teachers teach, test, and hope for the best. [Adlai] Stevenson [High School] teachers established standards of mastery for...common assessments and for each subtest within a common assessment. They set a bar for student performance and then worked to ensure that each student could make it over that bar.”professional learning communities
The Learning-Centered Principal
Richard DuFourMay 2002 | Volume 59 | Number 8
Beyond Instructional Leadership Pages 12-15
Showing posts with label formative assessment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label formative assessment. Show all posts
Sunday, January 15, 2012
teach, test, and hope for the best
Richard DuFour:
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
what's to like about Khan
from the same article:
Speaking as a parent and a teacher of college freshmen, I have zero interest in a 'flipped' classroom. I don't think it's going to work, and while I normally avoid making predictions (even in private), in this case I have no qualms:
Meanwhile C. is taking a physics course in which the teacher seems to have actually made "technology" work, also a subject for a separate post.
Khan Academy, for its part, teamed up last year with the Los Altos, Calif., school district to launch a pilot of the model. In it, students in grades 5-8 use Khan-produced online lectures as part of their math curriculum. The pilot has expanded from 150 students in five classrooms last year to 1,000 students in 40 classrooms this year.This is the aspect of "technology" that strikes me as extremely useful: the possibility of immediate, and reasonably accurate, formative assessment of student learning.
“It’s not just about the kids watching the same lecture the night before. For us, the big piece is having teachers use data to make instructional decisions about their students,” said Alyssa Gallagher, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the 4,500-student district.
Courtney Cadwell, who teaches 7th grade math at Eagan Junior High School and serves as a math coach to teachers in Los Altos, agreed that the rapid feedback on her students has been the best part of the model. The Khan program allows teachers to track what videos and individual exercises students spend the most time watching and working through, and how long it takes students to correctly solve 10 problems in a row for any given math concept.
Last year, as one of the first teachers in the Los Altos pilot, Ms. Cadwell started all of the students in her remediation class on Addition 1, the most basic Khan unit, and asked them to work through all the units at their own pace while she watched using the program’s data-tracking system.
Students worked through those initial units quickly, but she could see when they hit their “pain points”—sometimes on material covered several grades earlier.
“In order for me to get that kind of understanding of a student, I would have had to sit down one-on-one and work through problems and see a pattern, which I’m happy to do, but it takes a lot of time,” Ms. Caldwell said. “This confirmed my suspicions and allowed me to remediate much more quickly.”
“I was able to identify those learning gaps in real time, whether it was from 3rd or 4th or 5th grade, and I was able to remediate and saw those learning gaps begin to disappear,” Ms. Cadwell said.
Before the start of the pilot, only 23 percent of the 7th grade remediation students were proficient on the state mathematics test, but after the first year, the proficiency rate climbed to more than 40 percent, according to district data.
“The math class that they dreaded became something they really loved,” Ms. Caldwell said.
Lectures Are Homework in Schools Following Khan Academy Lead By Sarah D. Sparks | Published Online: September 27, 2011
Speaking as a parent and a teacher of college freshmen, I have zero interest in a 'flipped' classroom. I don't think it's going to work, and while I normally avoid making predictions (even in private), in this case I have no qualms:
I PREDICT: The flipped classroom - hot! hot! hot! - is going to be yet another edu-flop taking its place in a 100-year parade of edu-flops. 100 years and counting.The assessment question is different, I think. As a teacher (and a parent) I have a near-desperate need for more information on what students know and don't know -- and acquiring that information is easier said than done. I can easily imagine the Khan site (or any similar site) being an enormous help -- so much so, that I'm planning an 'online component' for my course next fall. (Though, again, we'll see whether my students can - or will - manage it. That is a subject for another post.)
COROLLARY: the flipped classroom is looking to be a big, bold, and brassy flop if everyone piles on before we have any indication whatsoever that a flipped classroom actually works. I.e.: before we have any indication that a) kids will actually watch the videos, and b) if they do watch, whether they actually learn anything.
Meanwhile C. is taking a physics course in which the teacher seems to have actually made "technology" work, also a subject for a separate post.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
fast feedback
I'm reading Stuart Yeh's book on rapid assessment of student learning via daily computer quizzes: Raising Student Achievement Through Rapid Assessment And Test Reform.
It's terrific, though it's also a case study in education school thought world-ery.
Example:
But 'drill' is bad.
Yeh is the person who showed that class size reduction was 124x less cost effective than rapid formative assessment.
It's terrific, though it's also a case study in education school thought world-ery.
Example:
[F]unding for rapid assessment programs may enable schools to begin to address the challenge of the No Child Left Behind Act to improve student achievement without compromising educational quality.Statements like this appear throughout the book, along with companion statements assuring readers that rapid assessment reduces skill and drill to the bare minimum, leaving maximum time for "critical thinking activities." The author has written an entire book about direct instruction, practice, and feedback: teacher teaches a lesson, then students do a bunch of problems and the computer scores their work pronto.
But 'drill' is bad.
Yeh is the person who showed that class size reduction was 124x less cost effective than rapid formative assessment.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
pick one
Class size reduction or rapid formative assessment?: A comparison of cost-effectiveness
Stuart S. Yeh, a, University of Minnesota, Educational Policy and Administration, 86 Pleasant Street, S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455, United States Received 18 October 2007; revised 26 June 2008; accepted 25 September 2008. Available online 2 October 2008.
Educational Research Review Volume 4, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 7-15
Abstract
The cost-effectiveness of class size reduction (CSR) was compared with the cost-effectiveness of rapid formative assessment, a promising alternative for raising student achievement. Drawing upon existing meta-analyses of the effects of student–teacher ratio, evaluations of CSR in Tennessee, California, and Wisconsin, and RAND cost estimates, CSR was found to be 124 times less cost effective [emphasis added] than the implementation of systems that rapidly assess student progress in math and reading two to five times per week. Analysis of the results from California and Wisconsin suggest that the relative effectiveness of rapid formative assessment may be substantially underestimated. Further research regarding class size reduction is unlikely to be fruitful, and attention should be turned to rapid formative assessment and other more promising alternatives.
"the persistence of bad industry practices"
in the September Atlantic:
Sitting here in Evanston Hospital, keeping watch over my mom and reading the National Reading Panel Reports of the Subgroups in the lulls between crises,** I had a blinding flash of recognition when I read the passage above.
ALMOST TWO YEARS ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.
About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.
It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.
by David GoldhillAtlantic Monthly September 2009
The subject of formative assessment came up in the Comments thread for Allison's post about middle school math pre-tests.*
Sitting here in Evanston Hospital, keeping watch over my mom and reading the National Reading Panel Reports of the Subgroups in the lulls between crises,** I had a blinding flash of recognition when I read the passage above.
My blinding flash was not about hospital sterilization procedures and physician hand-washing, however. No. My blinding flash of recognition was all about formative assessment, (aka collect & correct).***
Ed and I have now been lobbying our school district to use formative assessment (pdf file) ("assessment for learning") for four years. Four years!
Moreover, the district has been paying formative assessment consultants to teach teachers how to use formative assessment for at least two years.
But do we have formative assessment?
No, we do not.
Not only do we not have formative assessment, we do have administrators sending FOILable emails to parents in which they openly refuse to provide formative assessment when directly asked to do so.
Formative assessment at its simplest means: find out what the kids learned, then reteach the stuff they didn't learn.
Can't get it; district won't do it. Or doesn't do it. Either one. I don't know any district that does.
And that is "deeply unsettling," as Goldhill says. How is it possible that parents have to beg schools to provide an essentially cost-free idea that stands a chance of getting kids to college ready to do college work?
update 1:49 Chicago:
* [news flash: at the moment, I can't log on to the old ktm site, which had a number of good posts about formative assessment. Usually when this happens the site eventually becomes available again, but we'll see. I really need to get it backed up, finally. Here's the URL for the search page: http://www.kitchentablemath.net/twiki/bin/view/Kitchen/CommentsSearch]
** Do you know the meaning of the words meaning troponin leakage? I do.
*** It's possible I have been writing an education blog for too long.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
an amazing math teacher
My niece had a terrific algebra teacher freshman year. Scratch that: my niece had a terrific algebra teacher fall semester. Her school is on block scheduling so by January she was done with math for the next 9 months. Won’t take math again until the fall.
Here’s how he ran his class.
Every week his students have 3 chances to take a test on that week’s material. The test is short, perhaps 5 key problems. If they ace it the first time, they’re done. If they don’t ace it, they take it again; if they don’t ace it the second time, they take it one last time. The final grade stands.
The cool thing: the tests are cumulative.
The first week students take a test on the the first 5 problems; the second week students take a test on those five problems along with the next five problems; the third week they take a test on the first week’s 5 problems, the second week’s 5 problems, and the 3rd week’s 5 problems, and so on.
By the end of the semester they’ve worked up to a final exam covering everything they’ve learned in the course, which they remember because they’ve been re-tested on it every week of the semester.
The teacher also sends each parent a weekly email laying out in detail his child’s progress in the course. Parents can see whether or not their child mastered that week’s material, and they can see when he mastered it: 1st test, 2nd test, or 3rd. Parents can also see any set of 3 tests where his child did not master the material even with three tries. My sister says you could glance at the email and see exactly which material your kid barely squeaked by on.
The teacher explained his system on Back to School night and told parents not to panic when they got the initial emails because early on in the year the point total could suddenly drop 50 points when a student blew the first or second test. He told parents not to panic & not to yell at their kids because they’d have two more chances.
The emails don’t function as a veiled request for parents to kick in with reteaching and tutoring. They are information. Parents know what their kids are doing in the course. I assume that his emails do function as an invitation for parents to kick in with oversight and homework monitoring. Which is fine by me. Parents of students in his class know exactly what they need to know to manage the situation at home.
This may be especially important in my sister’s school because some kids intentionally blow off the class due to a complicated CA system whereby they get credit for “Math 1” even if they flunk Algebra 1. My sister and I agree that the problem these kids pose is school level, not teacher level. In my view (not necessarily my sister’s) the school needs to kick in with supervised homework sessions and the like. (See: LaSalle High School.) Working in a system that rewards kids for flunking algebra, this teacher deals with it by making sure parents know their kids have decided to flunk algebra, providing them with a weekly update on just how much algebra their kids have flunked to date.
The teacher is available every lunch hour and frequently after school for Extra Help. And: Extra Help actually helps. My niece went in twice when she wasn’t getting something. The reason she knew she wasn’t getting it was that she had barely squeaked by on the first two tests and still came up with a low score on the 3rd test.
She went for Extra Help after the 2nd test. My sister says the 3-test format taps into the Magic Number 3 that is embedded in the hearts and minds of children everywhere, as in: “I’m going to count to 3 and when I get to 3 you better be factoring trinomials or else.”
Clearly, the three tests serve as formative assessment. The teacher knows, the student know, and the parent knows whether the kid has or has not mastered the material covered in the course to date. That doesn’t happen in a normal math class. In a normal math class, as my sister points out, “Since no one grades homework, you don’t find out if they know anything until they flunk the test.”
This math class is far from normal because, as it turns out—and this came as a surprise—this teacher also grades homework. The way my sister and my niece found that out was that one day my niece blew off her homework: she just wrote down whatever came to mind and turned it in.
The homework came back with an “F” on top. The teacher had read her homework, corrected her homework, and graded her homework.
She went to see him and apologized. It had been years since a teacher had so much as looked at her homework and she’d assumed he wasn’t going to look at it, either. She asked if she could do it over again & the teacher said yes.
It will probably come as no surprise to learn that the homework sets weren’t burdensome. Perhaps because this teacher read and graded all the homework, or perhaps because he knew exactly how much homework the kids needed in order to master the concepts, he gave small problem sets. My other niece, whose teachers never so much as glanced at anything the kids did outside class, would be assigned dozens of problems every night; she’d sit and slave over her math and no one at the school would give it a second thought. As a result, the stuff they turned in was “the crappiest sh** you’ve ever seen.”
The kids in this teacher’s class, because their teacher was a collecter and correcter, learned to produce neat, readable solution set with the answers circled.
So:
I would put money on it the kids in this man’s class have some of the highest math achievement coming out of a public school Algebra 1 course in the country.
They better have, since it'll be 9 long months before any of them looks at the inside of a math book again.
the Gambill method
Here’s how he ran his class.
Every week his students have 3 chances to take a test on that week’s material. The test is short, perhaps 5 key problems. If they ace it the first time, they’re done. If they don’t ace it, they take it again; if they don’t ace it the second time, they take it one last time. The final grade stands.
The cool thing: the tests are cumulative.
The first week students take a test on the the first 5 problems; the second week students take a test on those five problems along with the next five problems; the third week they take a test on the first week’s 5 problems, the second week’s 5 problems, and the 3rd week’s 5 problems, and so on.
By the end of the semester they’ve worked up to a final exam covering everything they’ve learned in the course, which they remember because they’ve been re-tested on it every week of the semester.
The teacher also sends each parent a weekly email laying out in detail his child’s progress in the course. Parents can see whether or not their child mastered that week’s material, and they can see when he mastered it: 1st test, 2nd test, or 3rd. Parents can also see any set of 3 tests where his child did not master the material even with three tries. My sister says you could glance at the email and see exactly which material your kid barely squeaked by on.
The teacher explained his system on Back to School night and told parents not to panic when they got the initial emails because early on in the year the point total could suddenly drop 50 points when a student blew the first or second test. He told parents not to panic & not to yell at their kids because they’d have two more chances.
The emails don’t function as a veiled request for parents to kick in with reteaching and tutoring. They are information. Parents know what their kids are doing in the course. I assume that his emails do function as an invitation for parents to kick in with oversight and homework monitoring. Which is fine by me. Parents of students in his class know exactly what they need to know to manage the situation at home.
This may be especially important in my sister’s school because some kids intentionally blow off the class due to a complicated CA system whereby they get credit for “Math 1” even if they flunk Algebra 1. My sister and I agree that the problem these kids pose is school level, not teacher level. In my view (not necessarily my sister’s) the school needs to kick in with supervised homework sessions and the like. (See: LaSalle High School.) Working in a system that rewards kids for flunking algebra, this teacher deals with it by making sure parents know their kids have decided to flunk algebra, providing them with a weekly update on just how much algebra their kids have flunked to date.
The teacher is available every lunch hour and frequently after school for Extra Help. And: Extra Help actually helps. My niece went in twice when she wasn’t getting something. The reason she knew she wasn’t getting it was that she had barely squeaked by on the first two tests and still came up with a low score on the 3rd test.
She went for Extra Help after the 2nd test. My sister says the 3-test format taps into the Magic Number 3 that is embedded in the hearts and minds of children everywhere, as in: “I’m going to count to 3 and when I get to 3 you better be factoring trinomials or else.”
Clearly, the three tests serve as formative assessment. The teacher knows, the student know, and the parent knows whether the kid has or has not mastered the material covered in the course to date. That doesn’t happen in a normal math class. In a normal math class, as my sister points out, “Since no one grades homework, you don’t find out if they know anything until they flunk the test.”
This math class is far from normal because, as it turns out—and this came as a surprise—this teacher also grades homework. The way my sister and my niece found that out was that one day my niece blew off her homework: she just wrote down whatever came to mind and turned it in.
The homework came back with an “F” on top. The teacher had read her homework, corrected her homework, and graded her homework.
She went to see him and apologized. It had been years since a teacher had so much as looked at her homework and she’d assumed he wasn’t going to look at it, either. She asked if she could do it over again & the teacher said yes.
It will probably come as no surprise to learn that the homework sets weren’t burdensome. Perhaps because this teacher read and graded all the homework, or perhaps because he knew exactly how much homework the kids needed in order to master the concepts, he gave small problem sets. My other niece, whose teachers never so much as glanced at anything the kids did outside class, would be assigned dozens of problems every night; she’d sit and slave over her math and no one at the school would give it a second thought. As a result, the stuff they turned in was “the crappiest sh** you’ve ever seen.”
The kids in this teacher’s class, because their teacher was a collecter and correcter, learned to produce neat, readable solution set with the answers circled.
So:
I would put money on it the kids in this man’s class have some of the highest math achievement coming out of a public school Algebra 1 course in the country.
They better have, since it'll be 9 long months before any of them looks at the inside of a math book again.
the Gambill method
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
And Now For Some Good News
I've done my share of complaining about the standards set in the public schools. I thought I should also share something really positive. About a week ago, I heard a presentation by the middle school principal. This is a new guy, he's only had the job 2 years and came from outside the district. His presentation was the annual School Improvement Plan required by NCLB.
I was bowled over, shocked into silence. Why? Simple.
He clearly, unequivocally took responsibility for student achievement.
I have never heard a school administrator do that before.
He didn't blame the students or the parents.
He didn't imply that this group of kids just wasn't as bright as the previous bunch.
He didn't blame his predecessor (and that would have been understandable).
What he did do was great. The plan is a "laser like focus" (his words) on improving writing skills. The Middle School teachers are analyzing the curriculum; they are using formative assessments; they are identifying struggling students (those without an IEP that are "proficient" but haven't mastered the content); then they are providing instruction based on results of the formative assessments.
Students are given extra help during the school day at times most convenient to the student, not the teacher or the administrator. If a student can come in early, they meet then, if after school or during a free period work better, that's when they schedule extra help. Students are identified, they are not expected to know themselves if they need extra help.
He ends with the statement, "Imagine what a tremendous gift it would be if we could send every student on to high school being able to write well."
I can't believe they hired this guy. In a system filled by an unabashed constructivist superintendent, we get this gem. I feel like I should write him a letter of support (even though I don't even have a kid in the middle school at the moment).
I was bowled over, shocked into silence. Why? Simple.
He clearly, unequivocally took responsibility for student achievement.
I have never heard a school administrator do that before.
He didn't blame the students or the parents.
He didn't imply that this group of kids just wasn't as bright as the previous bunch.
He didn't blame his predecessor (and that would have been understandable).
What he did do was great. The plan is a "laser like focus" (his words) on improving writing skills. The Middle School teachers are analyzing the curriculum; they are using formative assessments; they are identifying struggling students (those without an IEP that are "proficient" but haven't mastered the content); then they are providing instruction based on results of the formative assessments.
Students are given extra help during the school day at times most convenient to the student, not the teacher or the administrator. If a student can come in early, they meet then, if after school or during a free period work better, that's when they schedule extra help. Students are identified, they are not expected to know themselves if they need extra help.
He ends with the statement, "Imagine what a tremendous gift it would be if we could send every student on to high school being able to write well."
I can't believe they hired this guy. In a system filled by an unabashed constructivist superintendent, we get this gem. I feel like I should write him a letter of support (even though I don't even have a kid in the middle school at the moment).
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