April 2016 | Volume 73 | Number 7

Looking at Student Work

Reviewer, Critic, Teacher

Marge Scherer

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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The Secret of Effective Feedback

Dylan Wiliam

"The only important thing about feedback is what students do with it," declares Dylan Wiliam in this article. The standard school procedure (in which a teacher looks at a piece of student work and writes something on it, and the student later looks at what the teacher has written) does not necessarily increase student learning. Teachers need to keep in mind that the purpose of feedback is not just to improve the existing student work, but to enable the student to do better work in the future. Wiliam describes how teachers can make feedback more useful by (1) assigning tasks that illuminate student thinking; (2) considering feedback as detective work for students, and (3) building students' capacity for self-assessment.

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Do They Hear You?

John Hattie, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

Although research indicates that feedback can be one of the most effective instructional strategies for improving student performance, getting students to listen and act on feedback can be complicated. If feedback is vague and personal, students may pay attention only to positive comments that are positive and boost their self-image ("That was a great job! You're so smart!") and defensively reject commons that are negative ("Confusing with some awkward sentences"). The authors offer practical strategies to get past students' barriers to receiving and using feedback. For example, to make the most of feedback, it's important to establish clear goals so that students know what they're working toward. Once students understand the criteria for success, they're more likely to accept and value feedback that helps them reach that goal. In addition, teachers should provide the right feedback at the right time, helping students answer the questions, Where am I going? How am I going? and Where do I need to go next? Third, teachers can help students develop their listening skills by giving them practice in paraphrasing.

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The 2 Es

Heidi Kroog, Kristin King Hess and Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo

What are the characteristics of formal formative assessments that are both effective in improving student learning and an efficient use of a teacher's time and efforts? That's the question that the authors explore in this article drawing on a five-year research study.

First, formal formative assessment is defined as being planned in advance, designed with the purpose of gathering information from all students in the class at the same time, and intended to move students forward through feedback and/or instructional adjustments. These activities should be windows into students' thinking—revealing not just answers to questions, but also how students arrived at those answers.

The writers argue that what teachers do with formal formative assessments is especially important. Instead of leaving low-level comments on work, such as "good" and "not quite," teachers should provide meaningful descriptive and prescriptive comments that help students understand their strengths or mistakes and how they can improve. Finally, teachers should use the results of these assessments to inform their next instructional steps, whether that is deciding to reteach a concept to a small group, meeting individually with one student, or introducing the whole class to a new concept entirely.

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Data-Driven Shakespeare

Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

Write first, talk second—it's a simple strategy, but one that's underused in literature classes, writes Paul Bambrick-Santoyo. The author describes a lesson on Shakespeare's Sonnet 65 conducted by a middle school English teacher, who incorporates writing as an important precursor to classroom discussion. By having students write about the poem and giving them feedback on their responses before the conversation begins, the teacher accomplishes ensures that all students have an opportunity to think about the poem independently and verbalize their thoughts. She also gains insight into students' understanding of the poem, which she uses to guide the discussion to address students' needs. This adaptation of traditional discussion-based learning, writes Banbrick-Santoyo, "is more likely to produce meaningful, rigorous learning, in which 100 percent of students grapple with the text and improve their ability to read deeply."

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The Building Blocks of Learning

Jennifer L. Kobrin and Nicole Panorkou

Learning progressions detail the incremental steps that students take as they learn to master a skill. These progressions are based on developmental research about how students learn and how their thinking develops as a result of instruction. A typical progression not only describes the stages that students must master, but it also shows what students can perform at any given level.

In this article, the authors describe a study in which teachers study a mathematics learning progression for measuring area and use that progression to analyze student work. Instead of simply noticing the strategies a student used to complete a work sample, the learning progression allows teachers to place the students' understanding at specific stages of development. With that information, teachers can make targeted instructional decisions to advance students to the next stage–and ultimately to the mastery of the content.

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Pre-Assessment: Promises and Cautions

Thomas R. Guskey and Jay McTighe

Nearly every modern instructional planning model, differentiation approach, and personalized learning system incorporates some form of re-assessment. Yet there's scant research evidence that teachers use pre-assessment in ways that improve learning, according to Guskey and McTighe. To increase the likelihood that pre-assessment will be worth the time and effort, the authors look at its potential purposes and problems. They offer three major recommendations: (1) always consider why you are pre-assessing, what information you are intending to uncover, and what methods you will use to gather that information—and make these purposes and methods explicitly to students; (2) Always take action to improve instruction on the basis of pre-assessment results; and (3) Use pre-assessments judiciously—only when they will provide information you don't already have and can't predict.

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Standardized Tests: Purpose Is the Point

W. James Popham

"U.S. students are being educated less well these days than they should be," writes W. James Popham. One key contributing factor is that educators often use the wrong tests to make their most important educational decisions. Two recent events have made it a perfect time to change the way we conduct our educational testing: growing dissatisfaction with consortia-built tests and a new focus on the proposed use of a test in the revised Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Popham urges the adoption of purposeful educational assessment, a measurement approach in which tests are built and appraised according to their one primary purpose, be it to compare student test scores, improve instruction and learning, or evaluate learning. "The primary purpose of a particular educational test," writes Popham, "should dominate the decision making of those who are building the test as well as those who are evaluating it." The author suggests several actions that educators can take to bring about more purposeful educational assessment.

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Grading: Why You Should Trust Your Judgment

Thomas R. Guskey and Lee Ann Jung

Many educators consider grades calculated from statistical algorithms more accurate, objective, and reliable than grades they calculate themselves. But in this research, the authors first asked teachers to use their professional judgment to choose a summary grade for hypothetical students. When the researchers compared the teachers' grade with the summary grades generated by computerized grading programs, discrepancies between the teachers' judgment and computer-generated grades surfaced. Consistently, grades decided through teachers' professional judgment showed greater inter-rater reliability than did grades computed by algorithms tied to computerized programs. Guskey and Jung conclude that grades are more likely to be fair and "meaningful communication" when teachers examine the evidence of student learning and use their judgment to decide what grade best summarizes that evidence than when teachers use computerized gradebooks for all situations.

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How I Learned to Be Strategic about Writing Comments

Cris Tovani

Middle school teacher and author Cris Tovani describes how—after years of feeling frustrated about the time spent commenting on students' work only to find their work didn't improve—she changed both how she responded to student work and what she did with the information such work revealed to her. Tovani changed the timing of her feedback and streamlined the process so it didn't take too much of her time. Rather than spending most of her time grading final papers and assessments, she began giving more ongoing feedback while her class worked on writing assignments or read a text together—commenting before the final product was due so students would have time to revise. Tovani shares tools she developed to gather feedback from her students about what they do and don't understand, as well as procedures she uses to let that feedback shift her instructional methods accordingly.

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More Than a Checklist

Gabrielle Nidus and Maya Sadder

Your students are sitting at their desks, using a checklist to revise their writing. You see that some are consistently checking off the same areas they always do as "needing improvement" and that others are simply marking off a skill as "mastered," scarcely glancing at the piece of writing in front of them. The authors suggest a better approach to getting students to revise their written work. They propose teaching the art of noticing—that is, helping students recognize the underlying metacognitive strategies that people use when analyzing work. The process comprises three key concepts. As students practice noticing and observing, they learn how to choose one specific focus for their revision and then monitor that focus through the course of several pieces of writing. As they engage in setting goals, they learn how to clarify their goals and ask for more focused feedback. And as they engage in monitoring and evaluating, they take ownership of their work.

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The Power of Peers

Rob Traver

"Students are naturally inclined to watch one another, to make suggestions and support their peers, to avoid mistakes, to copy what works and modify what doesn't, and to learn from one another," writes Rob Traver in this article. To prove his point, Traver brings readers into three classrooms where teachers tap into students' intrinsic interest to look at–and learn from–the work of their peers. In a secondary engineering class, students deliver practice presentations on two occasions–soliciting both positive and constructive feedback from their classmates–before presenting their final products before a large audience. In two elementary classrooms, teachers use student work samples in math and writing to help students learn from both strengths and mistakes of other students. The result, says Traver, is that students are more engaged in the learning process and that the quality of their work improves.

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Art in Action

Joanne Kelleher

Students are often required to create work in a vacuum, handing in papers to an inauthentic audience for the purpose of receiving a grade. As a result, students often neglect to consider the effects that their work can have on others. In this article, the author highlights an art project from her middle school in Kings Park, New York, that challenged this concept. Students used chalk to create mandalas (symbolic geometric patterns with designs emanating from a center point) on the outdoor walkway leading to their school's entrance. The students then undertook an action research project to determine if their creations influenced the moods of school community members. Like many other public art installations, this endeavor caused the community–students and teachers alike–to reconsider the purpose of what they create and the impact it has on others.

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Double Take

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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Looking at Student Work Yields Insights

Bryan Goodwin and Heather Hein

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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Has Our Instruction Made a Difference?

Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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Provide Feedback As They Write

Catlin Tucker

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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Why You Need a Diversity Champion

Thomas R. Hoerr

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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Beyond Grades and "Gotchas"

Carol Ann Tomlinson

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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How Your Group Examined Student Work

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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How Does EL Measure Up?

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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ASCD Community in Action

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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Seven Ways to Look at Student Work

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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Index to Advertisers

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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What Conversations Can Capture

Tonya Ward Singer and Jeff Zwiers

Although conversations between students can tell teachers a lot about students' content knowledge, thinking, and conversational skills, teachers and schools rarely look to this kind of "student work" to inform them about learning or to improve teaching. The authors discuss the many dimensions of student learning that closely analyzing conversations can reveal—from a student's oral language skills to how much that student is engaged in a lesson. They give examples from their work with teachers of how teachers have strategically analyzed in-school exchanges between students and used what they learn from such formative assessment to understand students' needs and choose next instructional steps.

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Making Protocols Work

Tina Blythe and David Allen

Many educator teams use protocols to structure purposeful and inclusive conversations about student work. Dozens of protocols are widely used in schools–but are they used well? The authors of this article, long-time researchers and facilitators of the examination of student work, acknowledge that using protocols can be challenging. "It can be hard to get the practice started," they write, "and even harder to sustain it in a thoughtful way." In this article, they describe strategies for that educators who want to lead protocol-based discussions can use to get the practice off the ground, push through discomfort, and dealing with initial lack of results.

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How Hungry Was the Caterpillar?

Allison Hintz and Antony T. Smith

Carefully examining students work samples and tuning in to their comments and discussion about those work samples are two powerful practices for understanding where students are in their learning. Drawing on their observations of math teachers, the authors show how teachers can use students' work to promote mathematical thinking, explore students' understandings, and inform future instruction. They describe a math lesson in which a Kindergarten teacher had 5-year-olds use recording sheets to keep track of how many foods the caterpillar ate as she read aloud The Very Hungry Caterpillar (devising their own methods). Students discussed their work, explaining their reasoning and critiquing others' reasoning about this problem, while constantly referring to their recording sheets. The teacher's plans for further instruction on the basis of what this sample work revealed—and the kind of thought-provoking feedback she gave the young learners—give readers suggestions for how to use student work to inform learning.

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More than Pretty Pictures

Patricia Crain de Galarce and Kathleen Kennedy

Art is a window into student thinking that can both document and develop young children's learning, according to the authors of this article. Drawing on three classroom examples, the authors discuss how teachers can use art to assess student understanding, engage students in "close looking" practices, and increase disciplinary thinking skills. In one classroom, a teacher asks students to draw a Tasmanian devil before, during, and after she reads an informational text about the subject. The result is a series of pictures that show shifts in students' conceptual knowledge. In another class, a teacher invites students to talk about their art, acknowledging that "dynamic dialogues" around their work reveal students' conceptions and misconceptions. In a third class, the authors describe how students are tasked with drawing scientific illustrations of specific species of spiders. By studying live spiders, comparing and contrasting different types, and creating iterative versions of their drawings, students construct their own understanding about arachnids, which the teacher can easily assess through the works of art.

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EL Study Guide

Kim Greene

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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InService Guest Bloggers http://inservice.ascd.org/category/educational-leadership/

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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EL Interview

Part of a theme issue on "Looking at Student Work."

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