Sense Making and Assessment
Essential to the success of this unit is the teacher’s role as facilitator in the student learning process rather than keeper or giver of knowledge. It should not be the goal of the instructor to hold students to only making particular connections at the cost of suppressing other connections or curiosities. When students ask questions that require a higher level of understanding than necessary to master the task at hand, teachers may tend to avoid sharing information that is forthcoming in a subsequent unit. The teacher’s intentions are likely not to withhold information but rather to focus student attention on the standards and question types that will appear on an end-of-unit assessment. While it may serve the instructor’s commitment to the scope and sequence to do so, it serves the learner to receive an answer to their question, even if the answer includes a caveat that future more intensive study will further clarify the answer that was shared.
The priority of the learning should be discovery rather than simply preparing students to answer questions on an exam. In “Teaching to the Test?,” Popham asserts that the purpose of educational testing to allow teachers to make appropriate inferences about a student’s content knowledge is undermined when students are only presented with tasks that are merely clones of the items they will see on the test.19 True learning transfer is evidenced by the ability to apply learning to a novel situation. When student exposure to novel situations is limited by overemphasis and overexposure to test item construction, it becomes impossible to determine student ability to problem solve and think critically. “Teaching to the test,” or item-teaching prioritizes memorization rather than promoting a deeper understanding of the content.
At times it becomes necessary to redirect students, especially when their tangential questioning appears to move them farther from meeting the learning target. Teachers will need to make in the moment decisions about responding to student questions and should be prepared to employ discourse moves to ensure they are not quelling student curiosity. Bywater et al. note that responding to student ideas encourages them to express more of their ideas in the future, adding
that “teacher discourse “moves” and questioning strategies can also guide a student because they can encourage a student to think about ideas that will help them reach the desired learning goal.”20 As discourse moves include pressing students to provide reasoning, it may be beneficial to ask students to explain why they thought of a particular question and how they see it connecting to the task. This can help the teacher and student understand the student’s expanding schema without sacrificing learning targets.
By responding in real time to student inquiry, teachers encourage learners to be sense makers who approach problems with a toolkit of skills they have acquired and connections they have made. Teachers and students view the assessment as an opportunity to demonstrate learning transfer when presented with various problems rather than an opportunity to demonstrate procedural memorization tied to particular question types.
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