Understanding and assessing

Guest blogger and Golden Apple Fellow Sam Dyson is grappling with what it means to understand and what it means to truly try to assess student understanding. 

Any assessment we make of students’ understanding is made indirectly.  As absurd as it may seem, most teachers reveal through their interactions with their students a belief, which I share, that somehow we ought to be able to read our students’ minds.  It’s not for a lack of trying that I have failed to do so.  After all, assessing what a student has understood is regarded as one of our basic responsibilities. It would seem that “mind reading” is exactly what we are called to do.

We also expect a particularly high level of meta-cognition from our students.  We might want to avoid the daily temptation of asking our students, “Do you understand?” unless we have deliberately concentrated on helping students learn to evaluate their own understanding.

Such a question is unlikely to elicit an informed response from the majority of students, yet we ask it all the time. Perhaps we teachers, having realized that we cannot read students’ minds, hope that they will do us the favor of surveying their own understanding to report back to us what they have found. 

Acknowledging that “Do you understand?” is a question that only the most practiced learners can honestly answer, instead of asking it we should offer them the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding by doing something they could only do if they understood.  Designing such activities requires skill and insight, but of all of the implications of what it means to understand, this may be the one we teachers can most frequently put into practice. 

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"Understanding by doing something...”

This is good. I had my students take frequent ‘metaquizes’ which were basically activities designed to get them to think about their thinking. In a nutshell, they were formative assessments of learning. For example, I would often ask students to draw a picture of a chemical concept we have been studying. I may have a picture in my mind of a particular chemical concept but how are students coneptualizing what I am teaching? Drawing the understanding is, as they say, worth a thousand words!

Another example is to have students construct concept maps of concepts. It is very easy to see where their understanding is different from yours.

Simply asking kids to develop their own lesson plan on the topic is something else that goes very far in making kids responsible for thier own learning. My students would work in cooperative groups and critque their lesson plans. These would also be shared between groups for further comments. The teacher has to make sure students don’t simply say, “Oh, yeah, I know what they are getting at.” They must be sure to question the author of the plan as they would a teacher if something is not totally clear.

‘How do you know’ can also be taken home. Have students write their own mid-term notices about their understanding of a subject. I ask students to be brutally honest with themselves. They are and take the paper home to their parents for comments. This was a great way to communicate a need for more help when students feel like they may be the only one not understanding a topic and are shy to ask for further help outside class.

The best way to learn is to construct your understanding and teach your understanding by doing something.

While I’m not in the classroom anymore, I do help many teachers with teaching strategies as the Technology Coordinator for my school. Wikis, blogs, etc. are great ways for students to show their understanding.