March
2009
A different way to think about assessment of student
learning
This month's Carnegie Perspectives is written by Bill Cerbin. He was a
Carnegie Scholar, participating in the Carnegie Academy
for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in 1998 and 2003. He is
professor of psychology and director of the Center for Advancing Teaching
& Learning at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse where he also
directs the College Lesson Study Project.
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or you can join a public discussion at Carnegie Conversations.
Assessing How
Students Learn
By Bill Cerbin
In higher education the dominant mode of assessment is to measure what
students have learned in a course or program. By measuring what students learn educators can
monitor student progress, determine learning gaps and gains, and document
achievement.
But measuring what students learn is of limited use if our goal is to
improve their future performance. It is akin to taking a person’s
temperature. You may learn the individual has a fever but the measurement
produces no insight into the cause. Suppose we find that students score
in the 60th percentile on a standardized test or that half the students
in a course have significant writing problems. What should we do to
improve future performance? Unfortunately, the assessment data provide
little direction. The result is a kind of guesswork by which we consider
alternative teaching practices or programs without understanding how or
why they would work better than standard approaches.
To reduce the guesswork we need assessment that reveals how students learn—how they
interpret and make sense of the subject, where they stumble, what they do
when they do not understand the material, how they respond to different
instructional practices, and so on. Understanding the basis of student
performance can help us identify appropriate teaching practices or
approaches.
A compelling example of this form of assessment is the Berkeley calculus project which took
place more than 25 years ago. At the time there was a large disparity
between the performance of African American students and other students
in introductory calculus at UC Berkeley. About 40 percent of African
American students received grades of D or F in calculus compared to about
5-6 percent of Caucasian and Asian students. Concerned about the
disparity, mathematics educator Uri Treisman decided to explore the
problem by focusing on how students learn. He wanted to understand
. . . how
students actually learn calculus. Do they use the textbook? With whom and
why do they discuss homework assignments? What do they do when they get
stuck on a problem?—the really basic questions about how students
learn mathematics. (Uri Treisman’s Dolciani Lecture)
Treisman observed 40 students (20 African American and 20 Chinese
American) as they went about studying and learning calculus. He was able
to identify key differences in the ways that successful and unsuccessful
students tried to learn mathematics. For example, Chinese students formed
study groups outside of class and devoted their time to the most
difficult material rather than simply reviewing the mathematics they
already knew. They compared solutions, tested one another, and talked
through difficult concepts. The African American students also invested a
lot of time studying calculus, but did it alone. Only two ever studied
with classmates.
Based on a detailed understanding of these patterns, Treisman established
a program to alter the way students learned calculus in the course. It
included, for example, “honors sections” of the course in
which small groups of students worked on particularly challenging
mathematics problems. The program addressed each obstacle that had been uncovered
by observing the students. After the changes were fully implemented the
percentage of D and F grades for African American students dropped to 4
percent, a stunning improvement. (See a contemporary version of the
project at Emerging Scholars Program.)
A large scale study like the Berkeley
project is not a practical option for most teachers. However, assessing
how students learn can be integrated with classroom teaching. Teachers
can scale down to examine
how students learn during a single exercise, assignment, or class period,
or focus on how they learn a specific concept, skill, or ability. (See
the Carnegie sponsored project, Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community
Colleges.)
Consider several methods accessible to most classroom teachers.
Observations of Student Learning.
As the venerable American philosopher Yogi Berra put it, “You can
observe a lot just by watching.” What better way to explore how
students learn than to observe them engaged in learning during a class
period? Teachers can do this during class discussions, group work, active
learning exercises, online chat or discussion forums. Better yet,
instructors can do periodic observations of student learning in one
another’s classes and then meet to discuss their findings.
Think Aloud. The think aloud
is a procedure during which students say out loud what they are thinking
while working on a task. Think aloud
pair problem solving involves student pairs, in which one
student acts as problem solver, the other as listener. The instructor
circulates among the pairs to observe students thinking aloud as they
work on an assigned task.
Lesson Study. In lesson
study several instructors jointly plan, teach, observe and analyze
student learning in the context of a single lesson. As one member of the
group teaches the lesson, the others observe students and collect
evidence of their learning. Lesson study allows instructors to observe
the interaction between instructional activities and student learning
during an entire class period. (See examples of lesson studies by
instructors at University
of Wisconsin
campuses at College Lesson Study Project.)
Strategies that probe the learning process offer close up views of
students grappling with new material, engaging in complex thinking and
responding to instruction in the classroom. For example, when asked to
explain social behavior college students tend to rely on a single
dominant factor such as a person’s upbringing or a personality
trait. Psychology instructors at the University of Wisconsin-La
Crosse used lesson study to explore ways to
move students beyond these everyday theories of behavior. They designed a
lesson in which students produced more varied and comprehensive
explanations consistent with discipline-based models of behavior. But
exposing students to the “correct theory” and engaging them
in more complex theorizing did not change their minds. As one student
said, “There may be all these other factors but I still believe the
way you act depends on what kind of person you are.” The episode
prompted the instructor to develop sets of mini-cases in which students
used psychological principles to explain behavior in “real life
like” situations throughout the course.
College teachers are aware of gaps in student learning as a result of
routinely grading their students' work. Encouraging teachers to assess
student learning as it takes place in the classroom can help them answer
questions about how and why the gaps exist. Assessing how students learn
can lead to the kind of information we need to make decisions about how
to improve teaching and learning.
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