I’m not so sure about that.

For this assignment, my son could choose to complete either three, five, or seven activities corresponding to “grades” of good, great, and grand respectively from a list of 12 possible options.  Acutely aware at age nine that more = better, he opted to tackle the following seven exercises:

• Construct a model of a Mississippi riverboat using a shoebox.
• Visit a local department store, read the labels on clothing and home furnishings, and make a list of ten things made from cotton.
• Make a chart that lists the capital cities of each southeast state, each city’s population, the year it became the capital, and the number of senators and representatives serving in each state’s legislature.
• Choose a southeast state.  On poster board, illustrate and label one mammal, reptile, bird, fish, and amphibian that is native to the state.  Write one fact about each animal below its illustration.
• Make a pictograph of the yearly peanut production in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Virgina using the scale 1 peanut = 100,000 short tons.
• Cut pictures of textile products from magazines and create a collage.
• Produce a television commercial for a beach resort in the southeast.

These “fun and educationally sound projects” became something of a family affair that required a considerable investment of time and small measure of money.  As such, when we finally finished the seventh and final activity this afternoon, I felt it prudent to ask him what he had learned from each of the exercises.  Here are his initial, unedited responses:

• Shoebox Riverboat: The cheap spray paint you got was crappy; next time buy the good stuff.
• Cotton List: Most clothes are not made in the USA.
• State Demographics: Do I have to remember all those numbers?
• Animal Poster: Florida has some pretty boring animals.
• Textile Collage: Sports Illustrated doesn’t have a lot of pictures of clothes.
• Peanut Pictograph: Peanuts can have one, two, or three nuts in the shell.
• Television Commercial: It’s important to smile when doing a commercial.

His remarks, albeit brief, clearly had very little to do with the history, geography, politics, economy, or culture of the southeast; the activities did not engage his mind on the topic of study.  Dissatisfied with his comments, we talked further about the projects and reviewed some of the skills he had utilized in completing the assignment.  His second attempt at reflection was a bit more encouraging:

• Shoebox Riverboat: Flickr is a good place to find pictures on the Internet.
• Cotton List: Google Earth can show me where those countries are that make our clothes.
• State Demographics: Government websites are good for getting information about states.
• Animal Poster: Google Image search is another good place to find pictures online.
• Textile Collage: Dictionary.com can tell you the definition of words you don’t understand, like textile.
• Peanut Pictograph: Excel is handy for converting pounds to short tons.
• Television Commercial: Editing video is pretty easy and my sister and I now I have a video on YouTube!

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I don’t know what grand will translate to in the teacher’s gradebook, but I suspect that a brightly painted boat, neatly organized pictograph, a simple but pleasant commercial, and the rest of his creations  will earn him an “A” regardless of whether or not he actually learning anything about the southeast.  After all, there were no learning objectives or assessment rubrics included with the assignment.  The skills that I made a point of introducing/reinforcing with him will, I suspect, go largely ignored.  Even worse, many of these projects, if done without the supervision of a conscientious adult, could actually instill some very bad habits; none of the exercises that involved research required students to cite their sources.

As a former science teacher, I’m all for “hands-on” learning but it must be “minds-on” as well, and the onus for making an activity educationally meaningful should not be left to parents.  While I enjoyed spending time with my son and seeing his mind at work (he is far more visually creative than I ever realized), I fear that the ultimate take-away for many families will be that good craft skills yield high academic marks; talent with a paintbrush or hot glue gun should not define learning.

That said, and on behalf of my son’s fourth grade class, I would ask those teachers who use pre-made materials that “save time and enrich the classroom experience” to please reconsider the value of assigning dioramas, copy-paste research, and poster board displays.  While there may be value in those activities, it won’t be realized at the typical kitchen table.  Dig deeply into topics of importance, incorporate practical skills into the teaching of content, and don’t equate quantity and quality.

In short, think less about students’ hands, and more about their minds.

• Reveal deep and important understandings
  • Core Performance Assessment
• Provide information about what students know about the topic
  • Short answer quizzes and tests, guided response, timelines, self-assessments, products in response to prompts
• Provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate the skills relative to the topic
  • Public performance, documenting of performance, formal observations or interviews

While the first two points are easy to embrace, the third is a bit more challenging.  Assessments that measure skills can be difficult to design and time consuming to implement.  Consequently, these types of assessments are frequently missing in the typical classroom, and ultimately that disadvantages our students.

The Need for 21st Century Skills

Although the UBD session referred to “skills” in the general sense, it should not be a stretch to assume that skills today also include what have been termed “21st century skills.”  We have addressed that concept before and are currently in the process of defining/refining what constitutes a contemporary educational skillset.  While the definition of 21st century skills is somewhat ambiguous, the need to equip students for the challenges of the digital age is unequivocal.

Whether it’s testing data from TIMSS or PISA, writings from Tony Wagner, Thomas Friedman, or Daniel Pink, or observations from within our own profession, all signs indicate that (1) a strong foundation in basic skills is no longer sufficient and (2) we are falling behind other countries in addressing the issue.  Our hesitation to change our practice can partly be explained by the difficulty in measuring these skills.  Difficult, however, does not mean impossible.

Measuring Skills for the 21st Century

This week Education Sector’s Elena Silva published Measuring Skills for the 21st Century.  Silva’s work provides a good overview of the need to teach complex thinking skills, examines several models for articulating 21st century skills,  and explores new assessments that can provide students those much-needed opportunities to “demonstrate the skills relative to the topic.”  As Silva states in her report:

“New assessments … illustrate that the skills that really matter for the 21st century—the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information—can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way. These emergent models also demonstrate the potential to measure these complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student’s mastery of core content or basic skills and knowledge. There is, then, no need for more tests to measure advanced skills. Rather, there is a need for better tests that measure more of the skills students’ need to succeed today.”

In light of our work with UBD and on-going conversations regarding curriculum and instruction, I would highly encourage you to read the full text of Silva’s article and visit the Discussion Forum for more information.  With time, patience, effort and understanding we can meet our students’ needs, both immediate and long term.

Timing is Everything

There is ample evidence that for feedback to be effective, it must be delivered in a timely fashion (Banger-Drowns, Kulik, Kulik & Morgan, 1991). In my son’s case, getting the results from his rather disappointing Chapter 6 math quiz on the same day that he began studying Chapter 8 means the “teachable moment” has been lost. Although he clearly needs to go back and learn/relearn some key concepts, his mind (and time) is focused on the task at hand; learning new material. His lack of understanding may never be addressed, and the “D” written in large print on his paper certainly won’t motivate him to develop his knowledge and skills.

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice

Through the years I have certainly marked my fair share of papers with low and failing letter grades. And while some assessments seemingly lend themselves to alphabetic scoring, a simple letter given without elucidation does not facilitate learning. When feedback is corrective rather than punitive in nature, significant increases in student learning occur (Lysakowski & Walberg, 1981, 1982; Walberg, 1999; Tennenbaum & Goldring, 1989). Marking incorrect responses and applying labels can be demoralizing; students must be made to understand that learning is a process and not simply a final product to be judged.

Get to the Point

While teachers may have clear expectations/benchmarks for evaluating an exercise, students are often completely unaware of the standards against they will be measured. Feedback such as “try again” or even “B+” do little to further students’ understanding. Specific comments on successes or shortcomings, though more time-consuming to convey, are invaluable, as are rubrics that provide criterion-referenced feedback (Crooks, 1988; Wilburn & Felps, 1983). My son’s Show and Tell report received a “thanks for sharing” but no indication as to whether or not he had met his teacher’s expectations. He has another Show and Tell due in a few weeks; what should he do differently next time?

Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater

I am not an authority on this matter, nor am I suggesting that we abandon letter grades and stop writing “good job” on the tops of papers. I would ask, however, that we consider the merits of providing timely, constructive, and specific feedback. If the research is correct, our students will truly benefit from the time we spend assessing their growth and development. I know my son certainly would.

As I assembled his work on the kitchen table, I was struck with the enormity of the task before me: four and half months of school added up to an eight inch stack of papers! Not wanting to discard anything important and needing a sorting method, I decided to create two piles: formative assessments and summative assessments. When I finished my task quite some time later, the results were rather disconcerting; approximately three-fourths of his papers were summative in nature.

While I must admit that my “research methods” were somewhat less than precise, the clear emphasis on summative assessment left me wondering what type of balance is appropriate in the classroom. How should the formative and summative piles compare? How many inches of formative feedback does it take to ensure that the summative stack is meaningful? How do your classroom assessments “measure up”?

My irritation and embarrassment for not having muted my phone and rather abrupt “hello” were met with the animated voice of my eight year old son. “Hey, dad, hope you’re not busy but I just wanted to call and tell you about what happened at my school today. My teacher showed me my report card and guess what? No D’s or F’s! That means I’m doing good, right?”

The all-important meeting all but forgotten, we spent the next 10 minutes talking about how proud I was of his progress. Like all children, my son has academic strengths and struggles, and as a parent I only ask that he give his best effort. And as a parent who spends time at the kitchen table every night helping him study and complete his homework, I can attest to the fact that he does.

When I rejoined my meeting and heard more about the necessity to clearly articulate the varying degrees of teacher performance, I couldn’t help but compare student letter grades and faculty domain rubrics. Does a teacher equate an evaluation of “Basic” to that of a “C”? Does a “C student” consider himself as being “basic” in terms of his knowledge and skills? Is there irony in that we spend considerable time and verbiage helping adults understand the terminology of evaluation but leave student assessment to be expressed with and interpreted from a single letter from the English alphabet? Perhaps my grasp of the situation isn’t quite “Proficient”….