In
this Educational Leadership article,
consultant Jan Chappuis addresses key elements of effective classroom
assessment: making sure the rigor of instruction matches the rigor of
assessments; using data to continuously fine-tune and improve instruction; and
keeping learning moving forward without being excessively tied to a pacing
guide. In the second area, Chappuis suggests that teachers need to be
especially attuned to these types of student learning difficulty:
•
Errors due to incomplete understanding
– For example, a primary-grade student puts a period after every word in a
sentence. Those periods shouldn’t be marked wrong; instead, the student needs
to be taught how to string words together into complete thoughts and put the
period at the end.
•
Errors due to flaws in reasoning –
For example, a student is asked to summarize a story and includes unimportant
details, or leaves out central points; a student is asked to generalize and
either overgeneralizes or doesn’t make an accurate generalization; or a student
is asked to make an inference and isn’t able to find the evidence to back it up.
Each of these errors can be addressed by showing students examples of correct
reasoning and counterexamples embodying their errors.
•
Errors due to misconceptions – For
example, many middle-school students have difficulty accepting Newton’s first
law of motion – that when an object is in motion, a force is not needed to keep
it moving – because it doesn’t sound right. “Misconceptions, whether in
science, social studies, mathematics, language arts, or any other discipline,
require an intentional approach tailored to the nature of the misconception,”
says Chappuis, “because the teaching challenge is to cause conceptual change –
to have students give up the inaccurate conception they currently hold in favor
of an accurate one.”
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