Saturday
April 19, 2008
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.
Labels:
