I don't have any samples of this, because I have moved completely away from giving End of Unit Exams, and thus have cleaned them out of my files. However, to give an overview of my original practice, my standard procedure was as follows:
1) Lecture and complete related activities until completed an entire unit
2) Give study guide
3) Give Unit Exam
This was frustrating for both me and the students. It was frustrating for the students, because they were forced to show what they learned within a very limited tool (the unit test). It was frustrating for me, because I did not learn until the unit test whether or not (and more often it was not) they had learned the material.
Artifact #1 and Analysis: Use of cogenerative dialogues
We learned in Professor Pitts's class that research shows that using cogenerative dialogues, small formalized discussions around a specific topic, is an effective way to pull students into the culture of the classroom, giving them a sense of empowerment, efficacy and influence in the culture of the classroom. Therefore, in place of exams, I have moved to using regular cogenerative dialogues.
One of the articles that I read as a follow-up to what I learned in class is the following: Tobin, K. (2008). Fostering Science Learning In Diverse Urban Settings. AIP Conference Proceedings, 1064(1), 50-52. doi:10.1063/1.3021271.
In this article, Kenneth Tobin discusses what he learned about the importance of including students in the creation of the classroom culture (which I also address in Rubric Item: Reflective Practice). In it, he discusses how students, through the use of cogenerative dialogues, feel more empowered within the culture of learning and the classroom, and thus tend to become more invested in the process of developing a learning environment. The ultimate goal becomes, then, for the students to be seen as co-teachers, and the teachers as co-learners. After reading this article, as well as others by Tobin, and others, I decided that this would be a good way, not just to examine my own teaching practices, but to assess students in a non-confrontational, non-fraught setting, as is so often the case with assessment approaches like unit exams.
What I do is have several students join me for lunch, and I ask them a series of questions, and the students take turns answering the questions. Sometimes an answer to a question will introduce another set of questions, which I may or may not incorporate into the current cogen. I use the cogen in several ways:
1) Question the students on specific content
2) Have students question me about specific content
3) Question students about the running of the class
4) Have students question me about the running of the class
I find that this format is ideal for truly getting to the bottom of the students have and have not learned. If a student is having difficulty expressing him/herself, I am able to reframe questions to pull out the content that he/she knows. On an exam, there is not this flexibility. Further, it gives students a chance to ask me questions. Often, from the level and content of the questions they ask me, their level of understanding is revealed. Finally, this process allows the students to feel much more comfortable within the framework of assessment, so they feel more comfortable taking chances, some of which open up to interesting, and thought-provoking discussions.
For instance, in a series of cogenerative dialogue that I conducted towards the end of last year with the project groups from my environmental science class, I was looking to assess their understanding of the financial and environmental impact of using various energy sources after they had completed a case study on energy use (which I discuss in Rubric Item: Pedgagogy in Instruction). I asked them the following questions:
What was the most interesting piece of information that you learned by doing the research for this case study?
What was the most surprising piece of information that you learned?
Your group decided to choose _________ as its favored energy source. Discuss how your group came to its conclusion.
Your group decided to choose _________ as its least favored energy source. Discuss how your group came to its conclusion.
These questions led to mini-discussion that all the group members contributed to. It helped me diagnose who had achieved higher levels of understanding, and who had achieved only a basic understanding of the material.
In addition, I gave the students a chance to ask me questions about the content, in return. The question that all of the students asked was, "What energy source would you choose?" To which I would answer, "What do you think?" While answering a question with a question is not necessarily good cogen practice, it got the groups arguing with each other over what they thought my answer would be. This, perhaps even more than the previous questions, gave me a good insight into how much each group had learned about the pros and cons of various energy sources.
While I do still give small weekly quizzes, the bulk of my assessments comes in this format. While I had relied, before, on the old-school unit exams, my students were not successful, and not comfortable. Now, using the cogenerative dialogues, the students do feel more empowered, just as the research suggests, and are much more successful. In addition, since the cogenerative dialogue is a much less confrontational assessment atmosphere, I am much more likely to have more students choose to participate in a positive way. Before, many students would decide they didn't know the material, and wouldn't even try the unit exam. With a cogen, even if a student doesn't feel comfortable participating at first, due to an initial discomfort with their content knowledge, there is almost always a point in the cogen where that student feels comfortable enough to contribute something to the conversation.
Artifact #2 and Analysis: Use of Enduring Understandings Wall (for PDF of my research proposal for the use of an EU wall, go here)
This is an image of the abstract for my research proposal for an action research project that looks at the effect of having the students create an Enduring Understandings wall on their comprehension and retention of content, and which I incorporated into my classroom.
I
learned through my
research, and also discussed in Professor Pitts's class that research
shows that
students who are taught using larger ideas comprehend and retain more
than those taught small pieces of content . Further,
research
shows that students who are involved in self-assessment are more
invested in the learning process, and show improvement in comprehension
and retention (follow this
link to see Rubric
Item: Education Theory and Literature for a discussion of the
reading I did in these areas). I
incorporated these two ideas by creating an
assessment system in which the students creat a wall of Enduring
Understandings, which also displays self-generated cognitive learning
maps. At the start of each unit, they answer a series of
questions, and evaluate how much they know for for a particular
subject. This is put on a poster that they revisit to make
revisions to answers throughout the unit. At the end of the unit
the students work in groups to develop Enduring Understandings for the
unit.
For instance, after the case study and cogenerative dialogues discussed above, the students developed the following Enduring Understandings:
While they might not have been exactly what I had pictured in my head at the beginning of the unit, they are certainly important concepts that I wanted the students to get from learning about the costs of using various energy sources.
For instance, after the case study and cogenerative dialogues discussed above, the students developed the following Enduring Understandings:
- Things like oil and coal cost less, but hurt the environment more.
- Things that are more expensive are more expensive because we haven't spent a lot of time to learn more about them before.
- Good energy sources to use are different depending on where in the world you live.
- Using more energy makes using energy cost more, especially when it damages the environment.
While they might not have been exactly what I had pictured in my head at the beginning of the unit, they are certainly important concepts that I wanted the students to get from learning about the costs of using various energy sources.
The Enduring Understandings wall is a physical reminder to the students, not just of the content that they have learned, but the work that they have put into learning. As they create the EUs, I get a much better sense of their comprehension, overall, from what they determine are the Enduring Understandings for the given unit. Deep comprehension equals rich EUs. Shallower comprehension equals superficial EUs. This assessment tells me much more than a right/wrong answer on an exam. Furthermore, this style of assessment does seem to be improving their ability to connect concepts between units. For instance, after the energy unit, we did a food and water unit. Due to developing the EUs, the students were able to see the additional environmental impact of various food and water choices, as an effect of the energy put into the food and water production.