Asking the right questions
Grant Wiggins (co-author of Understanding by Design) has posted a good article in Edutopia on assessment. He focuses on healthy assessment, which is to say formative assessment that gives feedback for growth for students and teachers. It should seem obvious, but I certainly don’t see it implemented as widely as it should be. Wiggins writes that
…British researchers Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam showed that improving the quality of classroom feedback offers the greatest performance gains of any single instructional approach.
So, why am I writing about this in a weblog supposedly about educational technology?
I’m mentioning it because I’m getting tired of people asking questions like “How can technology be used to support Essential Academic Learning Requirement X?” There often isn’t a good, clear answer to that question. When there is, it’s usually a fairly narrow, focused application, such as using Inspiration to illustrate the water cycle to help understand systems. Now I love Inspiration, and I think that using it for the purpose I just described would be really effective. But it’s a reductionist view that leads to thinking of educational technology as a bunch of separate, vaguely-related techniques and tools that don’t necessarily require any kind of major change in instructional strategy to implement.
Instead, we should be asking questions like “How can technology be used to improve the quality of classroom feedback?” We know (referring the research cited by Wiggins in his article) that if we can improve the quality of feedback, kids will improve in all content areas. If teachers are already focused on better feedback, then we can start producing some effective recommendations on using technology. Blogging, document cameras, online learning systems, and classroom response systems all take on a different focus if viewed in the context of formative feedback. And those applications are completely independent of any particular EALR, GLE, or whatever acronym you are saddled with. If effective formative assessment is an essential condition to improved student achievement, we can easily demonstrate how technology improves our ability to achieve that goal.
Ewan McIntosh mentioned suggested this in Wesley Fryer’s podcast on March 16, stating that he thought that if we focused on nothing else in educational technology, we should focus on formative assessment. It took me awhile, but it filtered through my brain. I heard a person use the term “elegant leverage” once, where you get the greatest return for the least effort. I think formative assessment can be our point of elegant leverage.