Overall
I am so incredibly happy with my standards based system. I feel like I know what students are weak where. I feel the students are able to ascertain where they need to focus in order to raise their grade. I feel my reporting system (the paper version, the online one is beyond my control it seems) is clear and easy for me to use. This means I can stop focusing on the reporting piece and start looking at how all this makes me a better, more effective teacher.
Bigger, Better, Faster
Well, maybe that’s not a good title since only one of those is important. . . The goal of every teacher is to be the best teacher he or she can be. If you feel you’ve reached that, it’s time to retire. I believe there is always improvement that can be made and always something to be tweaked. That said, I feel that simply embarking on this journey has done wonderful things for me as an educator. It brings into sharp focus the amount of practice and feedback I give on the various concepts of a chapter. It forces me to be honest, both with myself and my students, about how much practice I have really given over a topic. It is not fair to expect children to master a concept after the first or second try but that means you have to provide a first and second and even third try! I can’t hide from it or dodge it or soften it. The numbers are right there in my grade book. I think we as teachers mean well and do the best we can, but I often think we overestimate the amount of good stuff we do. We just don’t get there. You mean to reassess and reteach and redo but sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day. And that’s alright. But it does not do to kid ourselves that we are utilizing all this wonderful research when really we are not. I’m an overachiever when it comes to such things, but as is pointed out regularly, I have no children or husband to take up my time. So I hope you, dear reader, do benefit from some of my trials and tribulations in the unknown.
I was just reading about a concept called “spaced repetition”.
Here’s the except:
‘“Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach, students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction throughout the semester.
It sounds unassuming, but spaced repetition produces impressive results. Eighth-grade history students who relied on a spaced approach to learning had nearly double the retention rate of students who studied the same material in a consolidated unit, reported researchers from the University of California-San Diego in 2007. The reason the method works so well goes back to the brain: when we first acquire memories, they are volatile, subject to change or likely to disappear. Exposing ourselves to information repeatedly over time fixes it more permanently in our minds, by strengthening the representation of the information that is embedded in our neural networks.’
With a big standard like Standard 2 (the atom), I need to make sure I implement this concept. The article is applying it to homework but it would be applicable to the classroom as well. With the concepts divided into sub-standards, though you’re coming back to the concept throughout a time frame, it will be easy to map a student’s comprehension and retention of a concept. It’s another of those ideas we say we do all the time but do we really. . . I’m finding I don’t do a lot of the things I said I do. . . maybe that’s just the newish teacher thing. . . .
Another concept this article mentions is “retrieval practice”, though I’m still not exactly sure how this one works.
‘ A second learning technique, known as “retrieval practice,” employs a familiar tool — the test — in a new way: not to assess what students know, but to reinforce it. We often conceive of memory as something like a storage tank and a test as a kind of dipstick that measures how much information we’ve put in there. But that’s not actually how the brain works. Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting, so that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply reading over material to be learned, or even taking notes and making outlines, as many homework assignments require, doesn’t have this effect.
According to one experiment, language learners who employed the retrieval practice strategy to study vocabulary words remembered 80 percent of the words they studied, while learners who used conventional study methods remembered only about a third of them. Students who used retrieval practice to learn science retained about 50 percent more of the material than students who studied in traditional ways, reported researchers from Purdue University earlier this year. Students — and parents — may groan at the prospect of more tests, but the self-quizzing involved in retrieval practice need not provoke any anxiety. It’s simply an effective way to focus less on the input of knowledge (passively reading over textbooks and notes) and more on its output (calling up that same information from one’s own brain).’
This seems similar to the idea of quizzes as a formative assessment that simply marks achievement to this particular point.
I am very excited about all these new ideas. I think they will all come together beautifully! At least I hope so J
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