Being an educator in an industry of ever-changing pedagogy, curriculums, and politics can be both stressful and daunting. However, adaptation is necessary for success.
Since I began teaching in 2002, education has had several shifts. But, one of the more recent ones, online testing, has captured my attention because it has been one of the most alarming to teachers of tested content areas. Within the last few years, national, state, and local assessments have been delivered via online platforms, using a variety of technology-enhanced items (TEIs). Although these technology-enhanced items are not new in the post-secondary sector, they are relatively new for universal assessments in K-12.
Teachers are feeling pressure from high-stakes testing policies and some have resorted to teaching to the test. However, teachers don’t need to completely abandon classroom best-practices to try to teach redesigned tests. Alternatively, they need to be more intentional and targeted about how they use what we already know works.
Incorporate Learning Assessment Techniques
The implementation of TEIs has led to the need for teachers to understand how to use instructional techniques to bridge best-practices to online test administration. The premise here is simple: Teachers should not solely depend on online programs and web applications to teach students the necessary processing skills for technology-enhanced items. Teachers need to utilize responsive instructional strategies, including learning assessment techniques (LATs), to evaluate student progress during instruction and address misconceptions or incomplete understanding of concepts.
LATs are student-centered strategies that help students practice processing skills needed for summative assessments, while also providing teachers with evidence of student learning. These techniques bridge “teaching and assessment together to create a seamless and unified process” (Barkley & Major, 2016). The more students use these processing skills during active learning, the more prepared they will be for the redesigned versions of online tests that use a variety of assessment items.
LATs have three main steps:
1) Identifying the learning goal(s)
2) Implementing best practices to support instruction
3) Reviewing and reflecting on students’ learning artifacts and providing appropriate feedback.
Optimizing LATs for social studies
Although LATs originated in post-secondary education, these active learning techniques epitomize six best practices for optimal K-12 social studies education. The Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), and various state discipline-specific standards provide discrete indications of how social studies should be taught.
These sources taken together identify six common best teaching practices in social studies: (1) critical use of primary sources, (2) inquiry and discovery learning, (3) skill-building, (4) active learning, including cooperative learning, (5) metacognition, and (6) technological integration.
Teachers should carefully choose learning assessment techniques based on specific factors to guide instruction effectively.
- Does it align with the standards?
- Is it based on item types being used on assessments?
- Where in the lesson would it best fit?
- How will feedback be gathered and used?
Take a strategic approach
The need for a strategic approach to learning assessment has never been more critical. Each learning assessment technique should align with technology-enhanced items (TEIs) and require students to use the correlating cognitive processes. Here are some examples:
- To support multiple-choice questions, use group testing. Group tests are a high-energy, collaborative learning assessment technique in which students discuss and negotiate their answer choices to deepen their understanding.
- To support inline choice questions, consider using cloze procedures, which are a collaborative fill-in-the-blank learning assessment technique in which key terms have been removed from a short text, and students use a set of vocabulary cards or a word bank to determine the placement of the missing terms.
- To support hot spot questions, try using an image snapshot. A snapshot is an image annotation learning assessment technique in which students label the parts of the image to answer a question or clarify information about a key concept, event, or historical figure.
- To support students’ ability to answer a hot text question, teach students a sticky strips technique. Sticky strips is a mark the text strategy that allows students to tab important information, including responses to text dependent questions by cutting a 3X3 sticky note into five strips. Each strip created is used to indicate specific points of interest or stratgy in a text.
- To support the thinking needed for drag and drop, have students complete a variety of vocabulary card tasks, such as matching, List-Group-Label, or Odd One Out just to name a few.
- To support multi-part questions, utilize Scaffolded Question Cards, which are a series of scaffolded question cards that start with low-level, basic recall questions and gradually transition to critical thinking questions over time.
- To support match table grid questions, have students complete a semantic feature analysis. A semantic feature analysis is a chart that uses a grid to help students explore how sets of things are related to one another.
- To support multiple-response questions, students can play content-based Two-Truths and a Lie, a variation of the classic game that requires students to state two truths and one lie about a social studies topic.
- To aid students in being able to respond to short-constructed response questions, students could engage in Stronger and Clearer Each Time. Stronger and Clearer Each Time is a thinking routine that has students think and write individually about a prompt, use a structured pairing strategy to have multiple opportunities to refine and clarify their response through peer conversation, and then revise their original written response to incorporate usable feedback.
- To help students with writing extended constructed responses, teachers can use paragraph frames. Paragraph frames are a series of sentence stems, usually based on a text structure, that help students organize their thoughts about a topic.
The key takeaway is that the first time students engage with the processing required for technology-enhanced items, should not be on a test. Students should be given multiple opportunities to practice the thinking required to demonstrate mastery. So, before you put together that review packet for your next unit assessment, consider using backward planning to implement LATs throughout your unit. You’ll thank me later.
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Resources
Barkley, E. F., & Major, C. H. (2016). Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty. John Wiley & Sons.
Bolinger, K. and Warren, W.J. (2007) ‘“Methods Practiced in Social Studies Instruction: A Review of Public School Teachers’ Strategies”’, International Journal of Social Education, 22(1), pp. 68–84. doi: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ779674.pdf
LaTonya Amboree is a knowledgeable, charismatic educational leader, curriculum writer, and ideator who innovates professional learning to provide authentic learning experiences and resources to promote 21st-century learning. With over 22 total years in education, 14 of those as an education consultant, she is renowned for her adept leadership in social studies professional learning sessions, product generation, and instructional coaching. LaTonya is extremely passionate about the social sciences, and a lifelong learner in the field of education, and has provided over 100 professional learning presentations as an education specialist/consultant in Texas and surrounding states. In addition to working as a senior specialist at an education service center, she is also president of the Texas Social Studies Supervisors Association (TSSSA), has served as a member of the Team Based Learning Collaborative (TBL®) Steering Committee, is on the TBL® Education Development Committee, and is a TBL® Consultant-Trainer.