The Active Class

A few years ago, my son chose for his Halloween costume a pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, black leather jacket and a white mask with no features. I asked him what he was supposed to be and he shrugged his shoulders; he didn’t really know. I told him that as soon as he got to school, someone was going to ask him what he was dressed up as. It was inevitable. And so knowing that, shouldn’t he practice his response to the question he knew was coming?  If he practiced it, he would know it and would be prepared to answer the question.

Similarly, my husband Jay, who teaches biology, advises his students to practice writing short answer essays when they are studying for one of his exams. Students know that those questions will be on the test, so why would they not practice and try to write one prior to the exam? The idea is that you should practice what you know you will need to do, and it will help you learn. Surely, if you know something is going to be asked, shouldn’t you be prepared to answer it in the same way?

A recent research article showcased in The New York Times points to the effectiveness of taking practice tests in order to study.  Most students study in a very passive way—they highlight their books, or read over class notes. The research suggests that passive studying techniques may be less effective than actually practicing what you will ultimately need to do to show you have learned something. And that is to retrieve the information.

In the study published in the journal Science, researchers found that practicing retrieval led to greater learning gains than did studying with concept mapping. The authors propose that “a retrieval event may actually represent a more powerful learning activity than an encoding event” (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011, p. 1).

Concept mapping is often used by teachers to help students make connections between facts, and is considered to be a very active learning task. Students may be asked to use all of the information they have learned about genetics to create a map showing the major concepts and the connections between them. This activity is thought to be an effective studying tool. The recent work by Karpicke & Blunt (2011), however, suggests otherwise.

Even though self-testing has been shown to have tremendous value, many students ignore it when they are preparing for exams. When Henry Roediger of Washington University asked students how they study he found that “they think they know it because they have read it so many times, but they haven’t practiced the skill they’ll need on the test, and that is retrieval.” Roediger & Karpicke (2006) found that testing students immediately after they had studied a passage promoted much better long-term retention than if a student simply studied the passage over and over. And yet it was the students who repeatedly studied who had more confidence in their ability to recall details later.

Not only is self-testing and retrieval shown to be beneficial for learning, so is the practice of retrieval even when you think you already know something. If you study the capitals of the countries of the world and you think that you have mastered the fact that the capital of Turkey is Ankara, should you ditch that card? No, you should leave it in your stack and keep practicing retrieval. To have really good long-term learning you need to keep coming back and retrieving information, even if you think you know it.

The idea that self-testing drives learning is key to the efficacy of Prep-U, an online quizzing tool where students can take practice quizzes relating to their course content. Prep-U is an adaptive system and provides students with questions at exactly the right difficulty level for them. Students answer questions one at a time and must submit their responses before seeing the next question. In this way, students have to really think about the question and to commit to an answer before moving. Moreover, even if a student answers a question correctly one time, they may still see the same question, or a similar question, again in a later quiz. In this way, students keep practicing and retrieving information, and learning is supported. The effects of self-testing are also thought to be enhanced by feedback on whether or not answers are correct. Prep-U delivers this feedback, thus providing students with the opportunity to re-study areas of weakness and come back and take another quiz.

Used as an augmentation for any course, Prep-U can harness the power of using testing for learning, and it can encourage students to study in the most efficient and beneficial way for maximizing long-term learning.

Karpicke, J.D., & Blunt, J.R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 772, 772-5.

Roediger, H.L., & Karpicke, J.D. (2006) Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17, 249-255.

The field of education is abuzz—and has been for a while—about formative assessment. You can’t go to a conference or pick up an educational journal without reading about how formative assessment promises to change education. Sometimes, when I’m listening to people talk about their formative assessment projects, I raise my hand to ask, “So once you get the results from your assessments, then what do you do?” This really is the million-dollar question and one that is not easy to answer. If there was an obvious next step, everyone would be taking it.

Assessment is formative if you do something with the results—not simply assign a grade, but change the course of your instruction (or, if you are a student, the course of your studying).  In other words, a meaningful formative assessment is not just an information-gathering exercise but an opportunity to identify the learning needs of the student and make adjustments to better meet those needs (Wiliam, 2006). And yet, while researchers have demonstrated that well-executed formative assessments can improve student achievement and understanding, practical constraints tend to limit the use of formative assessments in the classroom.

To begin with, assessment has not historically been linked to instruction, and teachers are not required as part of their education to know a great deal about it. What’s more, when teachers reach the classroom, there is little information available to help them implement a formative assessment plan. Finally, there is the question of the time, resources, and expertise needed to use formative assessment. Stiggins (2004) remarks that day-to-day and even minute-to-minute decisions have a great impact on learning, and that assessment in particular should be used almost constantly—to “diagnose student needs, allocate time, design and implement instructional interventions, judge student work, and assign grades” (p. 26). But this is a tall order, especially for teachers who have not been formally trained to use formative assessment.

Given these challenges, what can we do to start implementing good formative assessment practices? Targeted professional development for teachers is clearly one way we can increase teacher knowledge of good assessment practices. Ideally, administrators should create opportunities for instructors to learn more about good assessment practices and make sure they have the time, resources, and infrastructure to act on the information they receive. But we also need to consider how to actually manage the use of formative assessment in the classroom—and this is not always straightforward. Here are some points that might be useful as a starting point:
1.    Develop strategies for implementing and applying good assessment practices.
2.    Take action to understand how to use assessment in a formative way.
3.    Help students see the benefits of formative assessment. For example, show them how formative assessment reveals gaps in their understanding and helps them focus their study efforts.
4.    Learn to use assessment information diagnostically to determine the course of instruction and learning, and to deal with learning difficulties.

In the meantime, I welcome the input, comments, and questions of teachers or administrators who are currently in the trenches and thinking about formative assessment and how best to implement it in the classroom.

Stiggins, R. (2004). New assessment beliefs for a new school mission. Phi Delta Kappan, 86(1), 22-27.
Wiliam, D. (2006). Formative assessment: Getting the focus right. Educational Assessment, 11 (3 & 4), 283-289.