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The Powerful Tool of Retrieval Practice 

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The Powerful Tool of Retrieval Practice 

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This link discusses the powerful tool of retrieval practice. It describes retrieval practice as the act of remembering

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Listen to my interview with Pooja Agarwal ( transcript):

Sponsored by Raymond Geddes and Kids Discover

We've talked about retrieval practice two other times on this site: First in 2015, when we read the book Make it Stick. Then in 2016, I interviewed cognitive psychologists Megan Smith and Yana Weinstein about the Six Powerful Learning Strategies You Must Share with Students.

In both cases, I noticed that although we were discussing collections of techniques, retrieval practice was at the core of both groups. Because it's such a powerful technique, I would think that by now it would have really taken off, that I'd hear teachers talking about it and see the term crop up in lots of education spaces, but I don't see that happening.

So I wanted to give it one more push by carving out a designated spot for it here. My goal is to help retrieval practice become a regular part of classroom practice and part of our common vocabulary as teachers. To help with this cause, I interviewed Pooja Agarwal, Ph.D., cognitive scientist and founder of RetrievalPractice.org.

What is Retrieval Practice?

Retrieval practice is the act of trying to recall information without having it in front of you. Suppose you're studying the systems of the human body-skeletal, muscular, circulatory, and so on. You could do retrieval practice by attempting to name those systems without looking at the list. Once you've listed all you can remember, you'd open up your book or notes and check to see if you got them right.

You might be thinking, This is nothing new. The whole concept of flashcards is built on retrieval practice, and flashcards have been around forever, right?

What's new is the research: In recent years, cognitive psychologists have been comparing retrieval practice with other methods of studying-strategies like review lectures, study guides, and re-reading texts. And what they're finding is that nothing cements long-term learning as powerfully as retrieval practice.

The Research

Agarwal and her colleagues studied the effects of retrieval practice with students in a middle school social studies course (McDaniel, Agarwal, Huelser, McDermott, & Roediger, 2011). Over the course of a year and a half, while the teacher continued teaching as normal, students were regularly quizzed on the material with no-stakes quizzes, meaning they wouldn't count against their grades. These quizzes only covered about one-third of what was being taught. The teacher left the room for every quiz, so she had no knowledge of what was included in the quizzes.

On end-of-unit exams, students scored a full grade level higher on the material from the quizzes than on any of the other material. The other concepts had been taught and reviewed by the teacher as they normally would; the only difference was that some things also appeared on the no-stakes quizzes, and those were the concepts students retained more fully when tested on the exam.

The very act of being quizzed actually helped students learn better.

Here's what this means for teachers: When we teach something once, then want to do something else to help students learn it better, instead of just reviewing the content, we're much better off giving something like a quiz instead. In other words, if we do more asking students to pull concepts out of their brains, rather than continually trying to put concepts in, students will actually learn those concepts better.

To read about other studies on retrieval practice, click here. For now, let's look at some ways you can incorporate retrieval practice into your instruction.

Ways to Use Retrieval Practice in the Classroom

Think-Pair-Share
This quick, low-maintenance strategy can be used at any time to have students recall information, then share it with a partner. You can use think-pair-shares with single-answer questions, or make them more open-ended, like "Think of one thing you learned yesterday about cells." Be sure to have students think on their own before turning to a partner. "It's important for students to retrieve individually as much as possible," Agarwal advises. "If you jump right into pairs, then we all know as educators that some students are retrieving and some may not be." One way to make sure all students retrieve is to have them jot responses down on paper before sharing them with a partner.

Low-Stakes Quizzes
These can be given on paper, in a Google Form, with an individual response system like clickers, Plickers, or Poll Everywhere; or by using a game like Kahoot or Quizziz. It's important to note that these quizzes are a learning strategy: Ideally, students wouldn't get scores on them at all, but if you must give some points, make them an almost negligible part of students' overall class grade.

Brain Dumps
Have students get out a sheet of paper and, within a certain length of time, write down everything they know about a topic of study. This can be done at the beginning of a unit (similar to how you'd use a K-W-L Chart), partway through as a way to reinforce learning, or near the end of a unit. Once students have completed theirs, they can exchange them in a think-pair-share or use them to compile a whole-class brain dump. Then they can return to their texts to see what they missed or what needs correction.

Flashcards
These can be a powerful retrieval tool in class or at home, but students need to be taught to use them correctly:

Once a card has been mastered, keep it in the deck a while.
Research has shown that students tend to "drop" cards out of their decks too soon after they have mastered them (Karpicke, 2009). Ideally, a fact should be successfully retrieved three times before a student moves on from it.

Actually retrieve.
Karpicke's research also found that when students see a familiar prompt on a flashcard, they have a tendency to tell themselves they know it, then flip it over to see the answer, rather than taking a few extra seconds to actually recall the answer-and ideally, say it out loud-before flipping the card over. The difference in timing is subtle, but important: Students will not get the same benefits from flashcards unless they actually retrieve the answer before seeing it.

Shuffle the deck.
Keeping the cards in the same order makes them predictable. Once a deck has been gone through a few times, it should be shuffled to make it more challenging.

For more tips, take a look at College Info Geek's excellent post on effectively using flashcards.

Tips and Cautions

Retrieval practice is not the same thing as assessment.
Although some retrieval activities might allow you to formatively assess student understanding, remember that retrieval practice is a learning activity. Again, if you must assign points for practices, make sure they will have a very low impact on student grades.

Space your practice.
Retrieval practice is even more effective if it's done in short bursts over time, rather than in a single long session. This spacing causes students to forget some of the material, and the struggle involved in trying to recall it strengthens their long-term learning.

Include feedback.
If students retrieve the wrong information, the practice won't be much good unless they find out the right information, so be sure to give them feedback as they go. This can be as simple as providing the correct answer or letting students check their texts after they have attempted to retrieve. "Part of that isn't just so students know if they got their answer correct or incorrect," Agarwal says, "but it adjusts students' metacognition," helping them get "better at estimating or judging what they know and what they don't know."

Match your practice to your assessment.
If your summative assessment for a chunk of content will be basic recall of facts, then the retrieval practice can be that simple. But it you're going to include some higher-order questions as well, then be sure to ask those same types of questions in retrieval practice.

Does it Fit with Inquiry Learning?

If your classroom is built around more hands-on, inquiry-driven approaches to learning that don't prioritize retaining specific content-structures like Genius Hour and project-based learning -you might wonder whether retrieval practice is relevant to your teaching.

Consider this: Within any of those frameworks, students still have to learn and retain discrete information. Take, for example, a student who has decided to learn Arabic as his focus for Genius Hour, or students who are studying soil pH as part of a gardening project. Both students will need to study and remember concrete information in order to make progress, so even if your instruction isn't set up in a traditional way, understanding how retrieval practice works can help you help your students learn better.

A Little Goes a Long Way

Agarwal's final piece of advice is to start small. "If a student just writes down two things or one thing they learned, and then you move on, that's okay," she says. "You'll still get benefits of retrieval without spending five minutes in a classroom discussion."

It can be a bell-ringer. An exit slip. A sponge activity. Something you do while students stand in line for lunch. Don't overthink it. Agarwal advises teachers to ask themselves this: "What is one way we can flip from reviewing information to students retrieving information? What can we do tomorrow?"

What will you do tomorrow? ♦

Learn More

Dr. Agarwal and her colleagues have put together this comprehensive guide to using retrieval practice. Visit RetrievalPractice.org/download to get a free copy for yourself. And be sure to follow Retrieval Practice on Twitter at @RetrieveLearn.
References:
Karpicke, J. D. (2009). Metacognitive control and strategy selection: deciding to practice retrieval during learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(4), 469.

McDaniel, M. A., Agarwal, P. K., Huelser, B. J., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger III, H. L. (2011). Test-enhanced learning in a middle school science classroom: The effects of quiz frequency and placement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(2), 399.

There's a lot more where this came from.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Come on in!!

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Retrieval Practice: The Most Powerful Learning Strategy You're Not Using

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Nothing cements long-term learning as powerfully as retrieval practice. Learn how to incorporate it into your classroom.

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Going into my third year of education, something that makes me anxious about assessment is the different types of rubrics and when to use each type. This link will explore holistic rubrics, analytical rubrics, and single point rubrics. If I am ever not sure on what rubric to use, this link will explore each and when to and not to use each type of rubric.

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you just don't know their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.
So let's talk about rubrics for a few minutes. What we're going to do here is describe two frequently used kinds of rubrics, holistic and analytic, plus a less common one called the single-point rubric (my favorite, for the record). For each one, we'll look at an example and explore its pros and cons.

Off we go!

A holistic rubric is the most general kind. It lists three to five levels of performance, along with a broad description of the characteristics that define each level. The levels can be labeled with numbers (such as 1 through 4), letters (such as A through F) or words (such as Beginning through Exemplary). What each level is called isn't what makes the rubric holistic - it's the way the characteristics are all lumped together.

Suppose you're an unusually demanding person. You want your loved ones to know what you expect if they should ever make you breakfast in bed. So you give them this holistic rubric:

When your breakfast is done, you simply gather your loved ones and say, "I'm sorry my darlings, but that breakfast was just a 2. Try harder next time."

The main advantage of a holistic rubric is that it's easy on the teacher - in the short run, anyway. Creating a holistic rubric takes less time than the others, and grading with one is faster, too. You just look over an assignment and give one holistic score to the whole thing.

The main disadvantage of a holistic rubric is that it doesn't provide targeted feedback to students, which means they're unlikely to learn much from the assignment. Although many holistic rubrics list specific characteristics for each level, the teacher gives only one score, without breaking it down into separate qualities. This often leads the student to approach the teacher and ask, "Why did you give me a 2?" If the teacher is the explaining kind, he will spend a few minutes breaking down the score. If not, he'll say something like, "Read the rubric." Then the student has to guess which factors had the biggest influence on her score. For a student who really tries hard, it can be heartbreaking to have no idea what she's doing wrong.

Holistic rubrics are most useful in cases when there's no time (or need, though that's hard to imagine) for specific feedback. You see them in standardized testing - the essay portion of the SAT is scored with a 0-6 holistic rubric. When hundreds of thousands of essays have to be graded quickly, and by total strangers who have no time to provide feedback, a holistic rubric comes in handy.

An analytic rubric breaks down the characteristics of an assignment into parts, allowing the scorer to itemize and define exactly what aspects are strong, and which ones need improvement.

So for the breakfast in bed example, an analytic rubric would look like this:

In this case, you'd give your loved ones a separate score for each category. They might get a 3 on Presentation, but a 2 on Food and just a 1 on Comfort. To make feedback even more targeted, you could also highlight specific phrases in the rubric, like, "the recipient is crowded during the meal" to indicate exactly what went wrong.

This is where we see the main advantage of the analytic rubric: It gives students a clearer picture of why they got the score they got. It is also good for the teacher, because it gives her the ability to justify a score on paper, without having to explain everything in a later conversation.

Analytic rubrics have two significant disadvantages, however: (1) Creating them takes a lot of time. Writing up descriptors of satisfactory work - completing the "3" column in this rubric, for example - is enough of a challenge on its own. But to have to define all the ways the work could go wrong, and all the ways it could exceed expectations, is a big, big task. And once all that work is done, (2) students won't necessarily read the whole thing. Facing a 36-cell table crammed with 8-point font is enough to send most students straight into a nap. And that means they won't clearly understand what's expected of them.

Still, analytic rubrics are useful when you want to cover all your bases, and you're willing to put in the time to really get clear on exactly what every level of performance looks like.

A single-point rubric is a lot like an analytic rubric, because it breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria. What makes it different is that it only describes the criteria for proficiency; it does not attempt to list all the ways a student could fall short, nor does it specify how a student could exceed expectations.

A single-point rubric for breakfast in bed would look like this:

Notice that the language in the "Criteria" column is exactly the same as the "3" column in the analytic rubric. When your loved ones receive this rubric, it will include your written comments on one or both sides of each category, telling them exactly how they fell short ("runny eggs," for example) and how they excelled ("vase of flowers"). Just like with the analytic rubric, if a target was simply met, you can just highlight the appropriate phrase in the center column.

If you've never used a single-point rubric, it's worth a try. In 2010, Jarene Fluckiger studied a collection of teacher action research studies on the use of single-point rubrics. She found that student achievement increased with the use of these rubrics, especially when students helped create them and used them to self-assess their work.

The single-point rubric has several advantages: (1) It contains far less language than the analytic rubric, which means students are more likely to read it and it will take less time to create, while still providing rich detail about what's expected. (2) Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended. When using full analytic rubrics, I often find that students do things that are not described on the rubric, but still depart from expectations. Because I can't find the right language to highlight, I find myself hand-writing justifications for a score in whatever space I can find. This is frustrating, time-consuming and messy. With a single-point rubric, there's no attempt to predict all the ways a student might go wrong. Similarly, the undefined "Advanced" column places no limits on how students might stretch themselves. "If the highest level is already prescribed then creativity may be limited to that pre-determined level," says Fluckiger. "Students may surprise us if we leave quality open-ended."

The main disadvantage of single-point rubrics is that using them requires more writing on the teacher's part. If a student has fallen short in many areas, completing that left-hand column will take more time than simply highlighting a pre-written analytic rubric.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Sources:

Fluckiger, J. (2010). Single point rubric: A tool for responsible student self-assessment. Teacher Education Faculty Publications. Paper 5. Retrieved April 25, 2014 from http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/tedfacpub/5.

Mertler, C. A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(25). Retrieved April 30, 2014 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25.
Know Your Terms is my effort to build a user-friendly knowledge base of terms every educator should know. New items will be added on an ongoing basis. If you heard some term at a PD and didn't want to admit you didn't know what it meant, send it to me via the contact form and I'll research it for you.

Keep in touch.
Join the Cult of Pedagogy mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!

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Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you've used them for years without knowing their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.

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This link above goes over the importance of creating rubrics with students. It discusses the benefits of including students in this process as well as how it benefits the teachers. After reading this article, I hope to include my students in rubric making.

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Build it Together: Co-Constructing Success Criteria with Students | Cult of Pedagogy

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When we include students in the process of defining quality work, they are more likely to rise to those standards.

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In this link, readers can see a podcast interview regarding the importance of retrieval practice. The two talk about teachers can implement this process and why they should include it into their lesson plans.

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The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 79 Transcript

Jennifer Gonzalez, host

We've talked about "retrieval practice" two other times on this podcast: First in episode 21, when I interviewed Peter Brown, one of the authors of the book Make it Stick. We talked about what cognitive psychology says we should be doing to help our students store the things they learn more permanently into long-term memory. One of those techniques was called retrieval practice.

The second time was when I interviewed cognitive psychologists Megan Smith and Yana Weinstein for episode 58, Six Powerful Learning Strategies You Must Share with Students. Retrieval practice was one of those six strategies.

In both cases, I noticed that although we were discussing collections of techniques, retrieval practice was at the core of both groups. Because it's such a powerful practice, I would think that by now it would have really taken off, that I'd hear teachers talking about it and see the term crop up in lots of education spaces, but I don't see that happening. So I wanted to give it one more push by carving out a designated spot for it in my podcast archives and on my website. My goal is to help retrieval practice become a regular part of classroom practice and our common vocabulary as teachers.

If this is the first time you're hearing the phrase "retrieval practice," I'll give you a simple definition: It's the act of trying to recall information without having it in front of you. So if, for example, you're studying the systems of the human body-skeletal, muscular, circulatory, and so on-you could do retrieval practice by attempting to list those systems without looking at the list; you'd just try to recall them from memory. Then when you've listed all you can remember, you'd open up your book or notes and check to see if you got them right.

You might be thinking, This is nothing new. And in some ways, you'd be right: The whole concept of flashcards is built on retrieval practice, and flashcards have been around forever. What's new is the research: In recent years, cognitive psychologists have been comparing retrieval practice with other methods of studying material-things like giving review lectures, study guides, and re-reading texts. And what they're finding is that nothing is as powerful for cementing long-term learning as retrieval practice.

One of those studies was conducted in 2006 by my guest, Dr. Pooja Agarwal, and her colleagues. They looked at students in a middle school social studies course. Over a year and a half, while the teacher continued teaching as normal, students were regularly given no-stakes quizzes (meaning they wouldn't count against their grades) on the material. These quizzes only covered about one-third of what was being taught at any given time. The teacher left the room for every quiz, so she had no idea what material was included in the quizzes. Here were the results: On exams given at the end of every unit, students scored a full grade level higher on the material that had been included in the quizzes than on any of the other material. The other concepts had been taught and reviewed by the teacher as they normally would; the only difference is that some things also appeared on the no-stakes quizzes, and those were the things that students retained more fully when tested on the end-of-unit exam. The very act of being quizzed actually helped students learn better.

Here's what this means for teachers: When we teach something once, then want to do something else to help students learn it better, instead of just reviewing the content, we're much better off giving students something like a quiz instead. In other words, if we do more asking students to pull concepts out of their brains, rather than continually trying to put concepts in, students will actually learn those concepts better.

Quizzing and flashcards aren't the only way to use retrieval practice in the classroom, and in this episode, I interview Pooja Agarwal about specific techniques you can start using right away, plus some tweaks that will make these techniques even more effective. To learn more after you listen, visit Dr. Agarwal's website, retrievalpractice.org, where you can dig more deeply into the research on retrieval practice and download a free retrieval practice guide.

Before we start, I'd like to thank Raymond Geddes for sponsoring this episode. For over 90 years, this third-generation family-owned business has been making fun and affordable school supplies, stationery and toys that students love.

Whether you're looking for merchandise for your student-run store, new fundraising ideas, or awesome rewards for your classroom treasure chest, Raymond Geddes has what you need from school supplies, fidgets, scented pens, non-candy Halloween treats and much more!

Visit cultofpedagogy.com/geddes and use code COP20 when you check out to get free shipping and 20% off your first order.

I also want to thank you for the reviews you've left for this podcast on iTunes. Every new review gives new listeners more reasons to come check out the show. So if you like what I'm doing here and you think other teachers would like it, too, head over to iTunes and leave a review. Thanks.

So before I play the interview, I want to say one more thing about retrieval practice. In other episodes of this podcast, we've talked about more hands-on, inquiry-driven approaches to learning that don't prioritize retaining specific content-things like Genius Hour and project-based learning-but within any of those frameworks, students still have to learn and retain discrete information. Take, for example, a student who has decided to learn Arabic as his focus for Genius Hour, or students who are studying soil pH as part of a gardening project. In both cases, they will need to study and remember concrete information in order to make progress, so even if your instruction isn't set up in a traditional way, understanding how retrieval practice works can help you help your students learn better.

Now here's my interview with Pooja Agarwal.

GONZALEZ: Pooja, welcome to the podcast.

AGARWAL: Thank you so much. It's my pleasure.

GONZALEZ: We're going to talk all about retrieval practice today, but before we get into it, if you could just tell us a little bit about who you are and the work you're doing around this topic and why this is something that's really interesting to you.

AGARWAL: I would like to think of myself as almost a combination of cognitive scientist with a K-12 teaching background with all sorts of other things thrown in. All of my interest in this world of cognitive science and retrieval practice really started when I was in college and I was majoring in elementary education and getting my certificate. Visually in my head I was going to one side of campus for all of my methods courses and my practica and learning about K-12 education and elementary ed, and then as a double major in psychology, I would literally walk across to the other side of campus and in the psychology building at Washington University in St. Louis I would be taking psychology classes on how humans and students learn and remember. It was just so weird to me that the two different buildings and the two different sides of campus, and my two different majors were talking about the same thing, but in very different ways without even really talking about each other. And so it was one of those sort of ah-ha moments for me, where I wanted to bring them together and I wanted to figure out how they work and how we can especially put in some research-based practices into classroom learning.

GONZALEZ: Got it. And so did you end up spending any time in the classroom, or did you just start to go into the cognitive science route of things?

AGARWAL: I did student teach fourth and fifth grade, and I've subbed here and there, but I did go into research. At the same time, I've made it a focus of my cognitive research to be in K-12 schools for 15 years or more than 10 years, and so almost all of my research has been in K-12 classrooms, which is a bit unusual, and so I've really enjoyed that part of being in schools and doing research with fire alarms and snow days and absences and students who are sick and substitute teachers. And so I feel like I have a really fun experience and perspective of K-12.

GONZALEZ: Got it. And so it's become so important to you that you now have a whole website devoted just to retrieval practice. It's called retrievalpractice.org. Tell us a little bit about what teachers will find when they go there. What do you have over there?

AGARWAL: On retrievalpractice.org, I have a combination of research, so downloadable articles from academic journals or guides or books written by researchers. I also have resources, so a number of different ways to think about implementing strategies in the classroom, resources like a YouTube channel, and then tips really based on what other teachers have done in their classrooms or how you can do this on a really practical level, so how you can implement retrieval practice in a minute or less. So the website really provides this combination of research, resources, and tips, and I'm particularly excited about making that applicable for K-12.

GONZALEZ: Nice. I realize I kind of got ahead of myself, because I think the next question I was going to ask you is since you have been studying cognitive science and how it applies to learning ... well, okay. I have two different questions. One would be I want to know what made you sort of narrow your focus down to retrieval practice and then also what is retrieval practice? Because at this point, people are listening and they're going, "Wait a second. They keep saying "retrieval practice," and they haven't defined it." So why don't we define it, and then let's just talk about why it's so powerful in such a way that it made you say, "I'm just going to focus right on that."

AGARWAL: Great. Yeah, that's a good idea. Retrieval or retrieval practice is this idea of bringing information to mind or having students really pulling out what they know from their heads or from their minds. And so an example I like to give is to ask, for instance, Jenn, what you had for breakfast yesterday.

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: Do you remember what you had?

GONZALEZ: I do, because I have the exact same thing every day. I do, I have spinach and mushrooms and eggs and oatmeal.

AGARWAL: Wow. That's much nicer than my coffee.

GONZALEZ: So, yeah. But I get what you're saying. For a lot of people it would require a little bit more thought, yeah.

AGARWAL: Right. So kind of thinking back and trying to remember ... A more educational example I suppose is, for instance, thinking about-or maybe Jenn, do you know-what year King Tut became a pharaoh?

GONZALEZ: Oh my gosh. Do you know, I used to know all about King Tut. When I was in fifth-grade my teacher was obsessed. I have no idea. It was a BC, right?

AGARWAL: Yep, yep.

GONZALEZ: 500 BC? Am I anywhere near?

AGARWAL: Uh, sort of. Do you remember how old he was?

GONZALEZ: Oh, he was a kid, wasn't he? Wasn't he like 10 or something?

AGARWAL: Yeah, he was 9 years old.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: Isn't that so neat?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

AGARWAL: So that's, I think, another good example of retrieval. It's sort of this abstract concept, but we do it every day, and we almost take it for granted when we're thinking about where we put our keys or someone's name when we meet them. Maybe we don't often think about King Tut or breakfast, but retrieval is that idea of thinking back and pulling information out. And something that's so neat, I really think is so neat about research from cognitive scientists and research my colleagues and I have done, is that that simple act of thinking back and retrieving information so dramatically improves learning. As I mentioned in the research I've done that's with Roddy Roediger, Mark McDaniel and others mentioned in the book Make it Stick that I know you've reviewed, in that research we've done some simple retrieval practice, and we can talk about strategies, that not only improves learning, but we saw benefits of retrieval practice to the end of the school year, and we saw benefits double for some students, and we saw benefits for special education students. It's just this really neat robust, reliable thing that we take advantage of and don't think about very often.

GONZALEZ: I want to make sure that we are really clear. What you're talking about is sort of the act of quizzing yourself on information without having it in front of you. What teachers will typically do is they will use that as an assessment strategy and give kids a grade on it. What you're saying is retrieval practice is not that. It is actually asking somebody to remember something as a learning strategy, not as an assessment tool for measuring.

AGARWAL: Yes, 100 percent. Thank you for mentioning that. There is, I think, this interesting interplay between retrieval and classrooms and retrieval for us outside of classrooms. Outside of classrooms, thinking about breakfast or King Tut, is not super anxiety prone, but as soon as we walk into classrooms, retrieval is so attached to the idea of assessment. Because it's such this powerful way to learn, the more we can flip the notion of retrieval as a negative and flip that in the classroom to retrieval as a positive, as a learning strategy, makes a huge difference.

GONZALEZ: Right. And so here's, I think, a great example. I am now going to remember that King Tut was 9, because we had that conversation. It wasn't a test, but you asked me to try to remember it. I didn't Google it, I just tried to remember, and that actual effort of trying to remember is actually strengthening those neural pathways, and then when you gave me what the actual answer was after I guessed, it's now more solid in my brain, and that worked with all different kinds of content. That effort to try to retrieve it is what the dynamic is here.

AGARWAL: Yes. And different content and students and age groups ranging from elementary students to medical education to older adults. It's really this, I don't know, it's this cool thing that just seems to work for all students all the time in all content areas.

GONZALEZ: And it sticks longer than just the assessment that students eventually take later. If they're asked about this information months and months later, they still have a better retention of it because of doing the retrieval practice.

AGARWAL: Yes. We've especially found that in K-12 and in medical education, yeah. It's pretty phenomenal.

GONZALEZ: So our goal, my whole reason to want to have you on this podcast is because I don't believe teachers are doing this enough. I don't think they realize the power of it, and I really want to have teachers finish listening to this podcast and say, "Okay. I want to start doing more retrieval practice in my class, and I know how to do it."

AGARWAL: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: So what we're going to do is we're going to talk about some of the ways that they can incorporate this into their instruction.

AGARWAL: One of the ways, again, that I think educators already use retrieval and a really great strategy is think-pair-share.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: All right. And so as opposed to a teacher perhaps reviewing everything from a previous lesson about Ancient Egypt is to ask students to think about one thing from that lesson or one thing about King Tut in a way that that student has to retrieve that information.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: And then to work in pairs and then to share it with the class all involves this element of retrieval in a way that review doesn't. I like the distinction between thinking about putting information into students' heads versus pulling information out of students' heads.

GONZALEZ: Right. And it's the trying to pull it out, and a lot of teachers tend to default to just, "Let's review what we did yesterday," and that puts more information back in, and so the act of trying to pull it out ... So one strategy would be to just say, "What is one thing you learned yesterday?" And this is where all of the kids, on their own first, would be thinking about an answer or writing down an answer?

AGARWAL: Yes. There isn't a whole lot of research off the top of my head on this, but I do feel it's important for students to think individually and retrieve individually as much as possible, only because if you jump right into pairs, then we all know as educators that some students are retrieving and some students may not be.

GONZALEZ: Right, right. Yep. And so having them do it individually, I used to find that too. I would like to have students just write something down real quickly, because it forced them to actually think of something to put down. And so, yeah, I think that's another nice component of that individual retrieval. So you would say, "What's one thing you learned yesterday?" And then they would share that with a partner?

AGARWAL: They could share it with a partner, you could have a class discussion, all which plays into this idea of feedback and how important getting feedback is, and especially as we know from the pair and the share, learning from each other, maybe other students learned or remembered things that we did not. But I love that retrieval can be even more simple in that there's plenty of research. If a student just writes down two things or one thing they learned, and then moving on, that's okay. You'll still get benefits of retrieval without spending five minutes in a classroom discussion.

GONZALEZ: So this really literally could be a 60-second thing that happens at the beginning of class?

AGARWAL: Yes. Beginning, bell work, exit tickets, middle of the lesson, anytime.

GONZALEZ: Okay. And that's really important that teachers understand that this is not something really time consuming to add to your plans. This is really something that you could work in. Now I'm looking at some of our notes, and you're talking about the difference between, say, these are two different things. One would be if I just taught something, and then we're packing up at the end of class and I ask everybody to get out an index card and write down one thing that they learned today. There's some value in that, but why is it powerful in a different way to ask them tomorrow what they just learned yesterday?

AGARWAL: Oh great. There is so much fun research on what we call spaced practice or spacing. And again, I think this is a fairly intuitive strategy, but building it in more, asking a few days later what a student may have learned a few days earlier includes this spacing, and it makes that retrieval more challenging. So, for instance, I could have asked you ... well, maybe you're not the best example, but I could have asked you what you had for breakfast today ...

GONZALEZ: Right, right.

AGARWAL: ... instead of asking you what you had for breakfast yesterday. And so for many people, that almost slight extra struggle boosts the benefit of retrieval even more. It's almost a more extra challenge to pull information out that's a good thing.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. I think I remember in something else I read somewhere that the difference between those two things is that the thing you just learned or the breakfast I just had, that's still kind of in short-term memory, so it's almost just a reflex to pull it back up again. But waiting a little bit longer with the spaced practice, you're actually trying to pull it out of long-term memory, which is more difficult. The phrase "desirable difficulties," I see that all over the place, that actual struggle is making the learning more powerful.

AGARWAL: Yes, exactly.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So we've got the quick think-pair-share is a way of having students do this. What are some other ways that teachers could build in more retrieval practice into their instruction?

AGARWAL: One way, kind of tied in but doesn't have to be think-pair-share, quite the same way is to use clickers or you had mentioned index cards. There's also a good resource called Plickers where students can click in their response and you can have a discussion or give quick feedback and move on. Of course clickers then may take a little bit more preparation than coming up with questions on the fly.

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: But they do seem to have fantastic benefits. So most of the research my colleagues and I did in middle school and high school classrooms were all with clickers.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: Either with multiple choice, or the cool ones where high school students can text in a response. And those encourage, again, that individual retrieval for students and it has that really good benefit, especially in terms of data, that can be used as formative information for the teacher. There I would definitely step back and still re-emphasize that the activity is for learning.

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: It's not for assessment.

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: But it just happens to be a side benefit.

GONZALEZ: Right. And this is another... I know, I think it's Annie Murphy Paul, I'm not sure if you're familiar with her, she writes a lot about low-stakes testing, and she gets so much grief from people, because there's so much pushback on the other kind of testing that we do way too much in school, which is the standardized testing and trying to pull data and everything. We're talking about testing as an instructional strategy, and so these mini quizzes. I mean, a teacher could really sort of map out a whole unit of instruction and plan within there these really brief little quizzes that aren't going to go in any grade book anywhere. They're just there to get the kids to start reflecting or retrieving some of that information.

AGARWAL: Even on the retrievalpractice.org website, I don't use the word "test" at all with the exception of maybe one place. And for me it goes back to really focusing on retrieval as a positive and getting away from that notion that retrieval is a negative.

GONZALEZ: Got it. I don't know if your research or anybody else has ever researched whether or not teachers are actually using the phrase "retrieval practice" with students, teaching them that and saying, "This is what we're doing"? And I would wonder if there's any positive impact of that, of students getting what's going on, you know? Understanding how their brains are actually working better when they're doing this?

AGARWAL: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not sure about research with teachers. I know anecdotally that many teachers find it beneficial to use the phrase "retrieval" or "retrieval practice" to emphasize that positive aspect. One thing we have done is again with my colleagues at a middle school and a high school outside of St. Louis, we surveyed more than 1,000 students, which is, I think, pretty neat and asked them about their test anxiety, because another concern with all of this retrieval is maybe students are going to feel or maybe it's going to increase students' anxiety, and we find the opposite. So we found that by the end of the school year, more than 90 percent of students say that clickers help them learn, and more than 75 percent say that clickers make them less nervous or less anxious.

GONZALEZ: Okay. Good. I want to also make sure that we differentiate between retrieval practice and excessive test prep. I've seen in schools where students are plugged into these programs where they're just constantly answering multiple-choice questions on reading passages, and to me, that's just trying to get them prepared to do standardized tests, and it's not asking them to do retrieval on something that they're actively learning right now or recently. It reminds me of The Matrix, just plug all of them into learning systems. But you're actually talking about content that they're learning in school right now.

AGARWAL: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: Yes. Content they're learning in school, in classrooms. When it comes to test prep, and I think particularly for my friends who are medical students they're using retrieval as a learning strategy, but that still places that negative emphasis. So, "I'm only using this test prep program because of the high-stakes test later," which is not the kind of retrieval that we should be encouraging with our students in our classrooms.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So we've talked about think-pair-share, and then using sort of mini quizzes with clickers or Plickers or even just index cards or things like that. And I can also, for people listening, provide a link to the Plickers website. I've talked about it, I think, on this site before. It's a nice, cheap way of using technology without spending really any money, because it's a teacher using their phone. So anyway, we'll explain that later. And then tell us a little bit about the brain dump.

AGARWAL: Yeah. I really like this activity that I like to call a brain dump. And there's again research we've done on the benefits of this type of retrieval where you could simply again, in one minute or less or a few minutes, is just ask students to brain dump-to retrieve or pull out everything they know about that American history lesson.

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: Or everything they know about King Tut. And a lot of students. we find, especially in elementary students, are just so surprised at the amount of knowledge they have.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.
AGARWAL: Because they may not be retrieving it until they do this brain dump, and all of a sudden, it's so great to see students filling up a page or three pages or more with all of this information that's been in their heads and then to brain dump it.

GONZALEZ: I could see that especially in something like social studies or even if you're studying a novel or something in a literature class to just ... The first step is just the student doing their own brain dump, but then what happens next after they do that?

AGARWAL: Again, the first step would be to not grade it or at least to grade it very minimally. So when I do this in my own classrooms, my brain dumps or my mini retrievals are only about 2 percent of students' grades, and I really emphasize it's only 2 percent. So with the brain dumps, again, you could use that as a think-pair-share. A colleague of mine, Patrice Bain in her sixth-grade social studies classroom, she has students do a brain dump at the beginning of a lesson, at the beginning of a unit, beginning even of the whole semester. So what do you know about Ancient Egypt? Students will do a brain dump, and they may only have a few sentences or half a page, and then to do the same brain dump at the end of the unit. And even the simple act of giving students their original brain dump compared to their last brain dump is such a nice way to reinforce the emphasis of learning. And so it's not even that those brain dumps have to be followed by think-pair-share, which would be a good strategy, but they don't have to be. It can just be a simple confidence boost in a retrieval for students to compare their earlier retrieval to their later retrieval.

GONZALEZ: Got it, got it. I would think just in a lesson like that too, if you are going to be doing the sharing, to see what somebody else came up with, I'm imagining the kids looking at other people and being like, "Oh my gosh, I forgot about that," and all of a sudden it's another layer of ... even though you as an individual did not retrieve that information, it's kind of another way of giving feedback on it.

AGARWAL: Yeah. And to build ... oh, there are so many things to build community with it so students benefit from each other. If it's more of a conversation, I find that sometimes we want to give peer feedback or we have peer grading activities. But if it's a simple, "Hey, this is what I got," and "This is what I did on my brain dump," is that, as you mention, an amazing beneficial feedback opportunity.

GONZALEZ: Right. You'd also mentioned to me in some of our correspondence that when you do the brain dumps or other retrieval practices, that it's fair game, that you ask about topics from any point during the semester. Talk a little bit about that.

AGARWAL: That's built into what we chatted about earlier with spacing or spaced practice. So sort of moving things into long-term memory or even more longer term memory and making that retrieval all the more challenging. That not only boosts learning, but it also helps students not cram, in a sense that my retrievals aren't just a midterm and a final, or my retrievals aren't for tests. They're little mini quizzes or little mini things that happen each week, but in terms of past lessons, I'm also very mindful of what I ask students to retrieve. So I may say, "Hey, a few lessons ago we talked about the concept of correlations, so hopefully you remember what that is. Maybe now, just give an example of a correlation." So I hardly ever ask students to define a correlation. That's not the sort of retrieval I like to include or foster in my classroom. But even just having students muck around a bit in trying to draw an example, and from that, that sort of retrieval, again, is so low stakes that students become comfortable in my classes with, "Wow. I actually remembered that stuff. That's really cool."

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: Or, "Gee, I didn't remember that, but now we can have a think-pair-share, and help remind me of other examples."

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Well that brings up a question for me. So if you're asking students to recall something and they can't, are you saying that the 60 seconds or so that they were trying to figure it out followed by the answer, so to speak, that that has value in and of itself?

AGARWAL: Yes, it does. So retrieval, even if students can't necessarily retrieve information they've learned, or students retrieve but they are making errors, or they were retrieving in accurate information, there's lots of research that that original retrieval benefit is valuable, and then providing feedback, after that correct information or the lack of information, is especially critical. So we did this in middle school classrooms where we had students retrieve, and we compared retrieval with no feedback vs retrieval with feedback. And even that simple amount almost corrects students' misinformation with a simple amount of feedback. In other words, it's okay if students make mistakes, because we all know we learn from mistakes and doing that is part of the retrieval, and then getting feedback is just as important.

GONZALEZ: Got it, got it. So we've talked about simple think-pair-shares. We've talked about doing actual short little quizzes, brain dumps. And then let's also talk about flashcards for a minute.

AGARWAL: Sure.

GONZALEZ: I guess as an instructional strategy and ... I've relied so heavily on flashcards as a college student, and nobody ever taught me how to do it, but I feel like some people just wouldn't naturally get how to do it, and so yeah. Tell me what you think about flashcards.

AGARWAL: Flashcards, again, are an intuitive way that we use retrieval, and we talked a bit about the negative aspects of test prep or using flashcards to study for class. Students use them, and as you said students aren't often taught how to use them effectively. There's some great research by my colleague Jeff Karpicke about how students often will, as I like to say, cheat themselves. We've maybe all had the opportunity where we have a word on the front and we have a phrase or an example on the back, and you look at the front and say, "Oh yeah, I know that." And you flip it over, and you seem to think to yourself that you're really confident that you know the answer. And so with flashcards, one common error that students make is literally cheating themselves. They're not retrieving. There's just this element of confidence that "I know it." With Jeff's research, he's shown that students also drop their flashcards too early.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: So in other words, if you retrieve the correct answer once or if a student does, there's a tendency to then drop that card out of their deck.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: "I retrieved it once. It's correct. I know it, so I drop it out." And based on his research, it's really optimal to successfully retrieve something around three times. There's also research by other cognitive scientists Katherine Rosen and John Vendlinski who show that there's sort of this optimal three-time retrieval. So students shouldn't just drop their flashcard as soon as they know it, but to really keep it in there. And then I would say the third strategy is to shuffle a deck. So instead of students going through their flashcard deck in the same order and then going through it again and again in the same order is to shuffle that deck up each time, which again challenges retrieval, helps pull things out, and is much better than just going through it in the same order every time.

GONZALEZ: Right. Go back for a second to the first thing about them cheating themselves, because you're talking about them looking at the one side, and then is it that they're flipping to the other side too quickly before they actually are answering the question, so to speak?

AGARWAL: Yeah, too quickly or almost out of what we call familiarity, so looking at that front side and thinking just a simple, "I'm familiar with it," or "I know it," as opposed to using your flashcards and kind of similar to what we were talking about with think-pair-share or in the classroom is if a student looks at a flashcard on the front is to actually say out loud and retrieve out loud what it is, what the answer is, or retrieve on paper as opposed to just looking at that front and feeling that we know it and flipping it over.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. And that's such a nuanced difference. You're talking about possibly a matter of two seconds, but it's so important, because ... And I know I've talked about this on this podcast before, but I would remember in college I would be sitting there with my flashcards, and I would see people in the same study hall with their textbooks just open, and they would be studying and I would be studying, but I would be thinking, "They're just looking at the words." I knew, without knowing this research, I just sort of knew I couldn't remember any of that information if I wasn't sort of covering it up in some way and testing myself on it and to see if I could actually remember it. I think too with the flashcards, one of the mistakes I see people make is if it's just a vocabulary test they're studying for, for example, there are words on one side and definitions on the other, and I'll see people look at the word side and try to remember the whole definition in their head, which I think is not necessarily a bad exercise, but they're not going to get tested that way. So I would always think, look at the definition and see if you can remember what word that is describing. You can recall the word, then flip it and check instead of trying to remember word for word ... Anyway. But I think that what you were saying before, I just wanted to make sure that was clear, that when students are cheating themselves, it's because they're just looking and they're thinking, "Yes, I'm familiar with that," and they turn it over without actually physically trying to retrieve the information on the other side.

AGARWAL: Exactly. And related to your observations in college, we also know that when students read textbooks, they tend to reread them and reread them and reread them, and so they're not retrieving.

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Okay, let's get back to the interview.

AGARWAL: Really helpful as a study strategy is also a brain dump of some sense. So if a student reads a textbook chapter, then closes it, does a brain dump, and then opens it.

GONZALEZ: And then that's when they're getting their feedback, right, to check and see if they remember things accurately.

AGARWAL: Exactly. And that's when they're also getting their retrieval as opposed to taking notes while reading.

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: And so I've done research comparing retrieval on open book retrieval versus closed book retrieval, and having that book closed is far more beneficial. You're not cheating yourself again.

GONZALEZ: Right. So if somebody is a biology teacher in high school, they could be teaching their students these principles and ... I feel like if they taught their students this stuff in September, they would see so much more success for the rest of the year, if they set aside a couple of class periods to show students, when you're at home studying, so many teachers will send their students home and say, "Study for the test." Kids have no idea how to do that, and most of them will just open up their notes and look at them and open up their textbook or go online and look at the information instead of doing something with it, and if we could just start showing our students, "Okay, look at this spread. You got a textbook open. I want you to look at it for a while, read it if you want to, whatever. Shut your book. Get out a piece of paper, try to write down everything you remember, and then go back and check." You're going to already have leapt ahead of where you would have been, right? Am I getting that right?

AGARWAL: Yes. And in terms of the leaping ahead, one observation I like to make with students is that when they leap ahead, they're actually being more efficient with their time, so their retrieval is not just effective as we've talked about, but especially with students, students are learning more, so they don't have to spend as much time studying.

GONZALEZ: Nice. That's good.

AGARWAL: And that makes a really big difference in terms of getting buy-in for students.

GONZALEZ: So teachers could be using, so this is one of those things that's actually a student strategy and a teacher strategy.

AGARWAL: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Teachers could be using these strategies with their students but also saying to them, "You can do this at home."

AGARWAL: Yes.

GONZALEZ: I think we should be making flashcards with kids at school, give them five minutes to work on it, and then say, "Go do more of this at home and you're going to ace this test on Friday," or whatever it is.

AGARWAL: Yep, yep.

GONZALEZ: Are there any tweaks that teachers could be making to the quizzing or the think-pair-share or the brain dumps that would make these strategies even more powerful?

AGARWAL: One of the tweaks I like to talk about, and I think is a valuable question is retrieval just beneficial for vocabulary words? Or is retrieval just beneficial for remembering this one aspect in American history? And it was a question I was really interested in, I guess, again because of its classroom applicability, and in my dissertation I looked at higher-order thinking, can you use retrieval to help students increase their higher-order thinking? So on a sort of Bloom's Taxonomy and analysis or a creation or a synthesis, how can we use retrieval to really push and increase student higher-order learning? So in terms of a tweak, I found in my dissertation with college students and K-12 was providing a mix of retrieval questions.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: So in other words, if we want students to be thinking on a higher-order level, then we should make sure our retrieval questions and activities are also complex and higher-order.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: As opposed to just hoping and expecting, "Gee, well, if I have students retrieve a vocabulary word, they should be able to apply this in a higher-order example or a higher-order type of material." What I found is that no, you really ideally provide a mix of the two, of fact-based knowledge and higher-order knowledge during retrieval if that's the type of learning you want to see in the future.

GONZALEZ: Right. I'm listening to a lot of this, and as a language arts teacher and a lot of my focus in the classroom was teaching students how to write, and so when I hear about a strategy like retrieval practice, I think, "Well, this wouldn't apply to me, because I didn't teach a whole lot of discrete, retrievable knowledge. A lot of it was just very skill-based." So what do we say to teachers that teach that type of a thing, where it's just really skill-driven, or maybe even somebody who's like a drama teacher, and they're trying to teach their students how to ... well, actually I know exactly how it works with drama, because students have to memorize their scripts. But I just want to have a little conversation about that, about certain subject areas. I'm always saying, "Well, I'm not science, I'm not social studies, so this just isn't going to work for me."

AGARWAL: I find writing and math, those two content areas, to be particularly fascinating because of a lot of content areas I feel that students are really retrieving. They have to write essays and practice skills or they have to answer questions and calculations. So a lot of retrieval is already built in. With writing, one thing I've learned in my own classes is instead of saying, "Well here are the good things and the bad things that this essay did or this artist did or this video filmmaker did," I recently asked my students, "Well, what are one or two things you liked about what was done? And what are one or two things you didn't like that were done?" And for me, even with writing, it's going back to not just reviewing information but asking students, helping students retrieve or connecting something with a previous lesson or a previous essay. So there's a lot of parallels, and I do feel retrieval is already built in, which my guess is why there isn't yet much research on retrieval in writing or in math.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

AGARWAL: But I think it's still valuable, and I think it's built in.

GONZALEZ: You've got my brain working now, because I'm thinking I would teach a lot, and all of us teach, with a lot of mentor texts and mentor sentences, where you're sort of looking at something that is already well-written, and then trying to kind of imitate some aspect of the way that they did that, so I guess I could see reading a short story or something like that, putting it away and asking students about their impressions and what was really strong in this, and what did you really like, and they would have to try to remember, how did the author actually achieve that effect? How did they make me feel this way? And then go back to the text and try to find exactly where they did that, and then you've got the retrieval going on, but then you've got a reason to be searching for a specific aspect of the craft.

AGARWAL: Yeah. Or even then going from closing the text or the essay, thinking about, or writing about, or think-pair-share with what they liked or disliked, and then maybe a next step with retrieval is writing a sample paragraph.

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: So here's what you did like or disliked, now write a paragraph focused on what you liked.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

AGARWAL: And then going back to see if they're all sort of on par with each other.

GONZALEZ: Right. Yeah, and you know, actually there's a lot of emphasis now too on finding textual evidence for things. Sometimes you'll read something and you'll have a certain opinion based on something you read, and you don't exactly know where you got it, so maybe not having that text available right away is a way to try to remember, "There was this one part where they were saying this," and then you actually get the opportunity to go back and look for it. I guess that sort of is similar to retrieval practice?

AGARWAL: I think so, yeah. Or even maybe a future lesson is to look back and retrieve back and say, "We read this essay and we already talked about how it's a good model or textual evidence that it provides. Tell me or retrieve one of those things that we learned or talked about," so it's still about a broader concept with textual evidence, but related to retrieval again.

GONZALEZ: Got it. Okay. So I got you. So the lesson could be something a little bit less with one specific correct answer, but asking the students even to just try to explain in their own words, "What did we just learn yesterday?" They're still retrieving that skill or technique.

AGARWAL: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: As opposed to just already moving on.

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: We know that students forget, and they forget very quickly, and so instead of just moving on or reviewing, is going back to that idea of how can I take review that I do as a teacher and turn it into a retrieval opportunity?

GONZALEZ: Got it, got it. Oh, I love that. Man, now I'm seeing all kinds of applications for language arts. Because yeah, sometimes we teach our kids to do something, and then if we never really go back to that skill or talk about it or anything, it's just sort of like, "Oh yeah, we did that one thing." It's like when I ask my kids at the end of every day, "What did you do today?" It's like, "I don't know. Nothing. Whatever." Yeah. Okay. There was one other thing in the notes that I'm seeing that we didn't talk about much yet was about the difference between elaborative feedback and correct answers in terms of feedback being an important piece of retrieval practice.

AGARWAL: So feedback is an important piece of retrieval practice, and there's a lot of lab research and K-12 research and medical education research showing that there's sort of this one-two punch when you include retrieval followed by feedback. Part of that isn't just so students know if they got their answer correct or incorrect, but it adjusts students' metacognition. So thinking about their own thinking, being better at estimating or judging what they know and what they don't know. So sort of going back to the idea of feeling really familiar and cheating yourself with a flashcard. With feedback, then students can better understand, "Wow, I really thought that that was the answer, but I got it wrong." An example we like to give is remembering or thinking about what is the capital of Australia? I don't know if you know what the capital of Australia is.

GONZALEZ: I don't know. I bet it's not Sydney or Melbourne though, because that's what people would say, and then they would be wrong, right?

AGARWAL: Exactly. So we often feel confident that it's Sydney or Melbourne, but it's actually Canberra.

GONZALEZ: You know ...

AGARWAL: Yes?

GONZALEZ: No, no. I'm probably saying what most people say, because I kind of had that too, and I was like, I don't even know what that is.

AGARWAL: Well I know it, because I've looked it up, but that's cheating, right? It's a good example, especially for our students where they can be so confident in something but they can be off base. And so providing feedback for that type of metacognition, understanding, "Do I really know it or do I kind of know it?" That's an important aspect of telling students whether they were correct or incorrect or giving them elaborative feedback. The difference between correct answer or sort of right/wrong feedback and elaborative feedback you can imagine is more of the explanation, here's why something is correct, here's why something is incorrect. A lot of laboratory research has shown that the elaborative feedback is much more beneficial for learning.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

AGARWAL: Which seems pretty intuitive, right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

AGARWAL: It's helpful for students to know why they got something wrong as opposed to just "you're wrong" or "you're right."

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: There's still, I would say, a mixed bag of research in part because when we looked at elaborative versus correct answer feedback in an eighth-grade science classroom, especially over the long term, so by the end of the semester, feedback was still very beneficial after retrieval, but we didn't see a difference, really, between elaborative feedback and correct answer feedback.

GONZALEZ: Got it.

AGARWAL: And of course laboratory research is not only with college students with well-controlled materials. Laboratory studies also have a very short time span, so usually they only looked at learning after one week.

GONZALEZ: Right.

AGARWAL: And what I really like about our research in eighth grade and in K-12 is we look at learning over a semester over a year. And so I do feel that elaborative feedback has its benefits, but as an educator, if those benefits are somewhat similar, especially in the long term, I'd recommend doing what's practical.

GONZALEZ: Right. And you can get a lot more feedback, I guess, if you're only doing correct answer feedback, you can give a lot more of it.

AGARWAL: Right, yeah.

GONZALEZ: Okay. Man, this has been great. I thought I already knew retrieval practice, and I feel like I've learned stuff just in this hour of talking to you, so I'm so excited. I hope this is really helping encourage more teachers to use retrieval practice. Is there anything that we skipped over that you wanted to talk about before we kind of get into your contact information?

AGARWAL: Oh, one thing I would encourage is to just start small. I think a lot of these strategies might sound like a big deal, and we have talked about earlier strategies that can be very simple, like asking a question and then having students do think-pair-share, writing down their response. I really like to encourage us to think about, how can we use this tomorrow?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

AGARWAL: So what is one way we can use retrieval in our classrooms tomorrow without having to come up with quizzes, without having to suddenly buy clickers, without having to think about feedback? What is one way we can switch retrieval from a negative to a positive? What is one way we can flip from reviewing information to students retrieving information and really pulling that information out? How can we start small? What can we do tomorrow?

GONZALEZ: Good. I think that probably last little bit helped a few more teachers resolve to give this a shot tomorrow. I hope they do.

AGARWAL: Yeah, me too.

GONZALEZ: So where can people find you online?

AGARWAL: So a lot of the information we talked about is on retrievalpractice.org. That has resources, including books, websites, other podcasts that you can access to learn more. I also have research included, so academic journal articles, links to articles written by cognitive scientists and tips, information and strategies that teachers have used in their own classroom that are easy to adapt in any classroom or content area. So that's all on retrievalpractice.org. We have a special website just for Cult of Pedagogy, which is retrievalpractice.org/cult, and there you can find some special extra information about subscribing for email updates and getting kind of a summary of what we've talked about and the very key research, resources, and tips I recommend.

GONZALEZ: Fantastic.

AGARWAL: And I'm also on Twitter @retrievelearn, and you can learn more about me and my nice jumble of background in cognitive science in K-12 at PoojaAgarwal.com, on Twitter @PoojaAgarwal.

GONZALEZ: Fantastic. Thank you so much for spending so much time helping us unpack this and get it into more classrooms.

AGARWAL: Oh, thank you so much, and I'm so excited to share all of this, I really am.

For links to all the resources mentioned in this episode, including Dr. Agarwal's free guide to retrieval practice, visit cultofpedagogy.com/pod and click on Episode 79. To get weekly updates on all my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.

This podcast is a proud member of the Education Podcast Network: Podcasts for educators, podcasts by educators. To learn more, visit edupodcastnetwork.com.

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Episode 79: Retrieval Practice with Pooja Agarwal

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The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 79 Transcript Jennifer Gonzalez, host We've talked about "retrieval practice" two other times on this podcast: First in episode 21, when I interviewed Peter Brown, one of the authors of the book Make it Stick. We talked about what cognitive psychology says we should be doing to help our ...

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Creating a rubric can be difficult. However, turning scores assessed through the rubric can be even more difficult. This link walks through eight different steps on how to turn scores assessed through a single-point cubic and turn them into actual grades that students can understand.

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I have written several posts about the different types of rubrics-especially my favorite, the single-point rubric-and over time, many teachers have asked me about the most effective way to convert the information on these rubrics into points. Even if you are moving toward a no grades classroom, as a growing number of educators are, you may still be required to supply points or letter grades for student assignments.

Despite the title of this post, all I can really offer here is a description of my own process. It has been refined over years of trial and error, and the only evidence I have to back up its effectiveness is that in over 10 years of teaching middle school and college, I can only recall one or two times when a student or parent challenged a grade I gave based on a rubric. This is by no means the only way to do it-I'm sure plenty of other processes exist-but this is what has worked for me.

Before I get into the specifics of the scores themselves, I'm going to describe all the things that happen before those points go into the grade book. I'll do this with an example scenario: Suppose I want my eighth-grade students to write a narrative account of a true story. This will not be a personal narrative, but rather a journalistic piece that illustrates some larger concept, such as the story of one student's chaotic after-school routine to illustrate the problem of some kids having too many activities and homework after school.

Step 1: Define the Criteria

To start with, I have to get clear on what the final product should look like. Although I have my own opinions of what makes a well-written story, I need to put that into words so my students know what I'm looking for. Ideally, this criteria should be developed with my students. Any project will be more effective if students are part of the conversation from the beginning; I would ask them what makes for a good story, what kind of criteria should be used to judge its quality, and so on. To generate ideas for this discussion, we would first read a few examples from magazines and websites of the type of writing I want them to produce, and we'd figure out what qualities make these stories work. Eventually we'd shape these ideas into a list of attributes for the rubric. (Full disclosure: This is an ideal scenario. I often skipped the step of involving students to save time, but that was ultimately not the best decision.)

I would also consult with my standards and curriculum materials, to make sure I wasn't missing something relevant and to make sure the language in my rubric is aligned with those standards.

Using the single-point format, my rubric would look something like this:

If you have been working with single-point rubrics, you know that the left-hand column is reserved for indicating how students need to improve. The right-hand column has a different title than what I have used in the past. In earlier versions I titled this column"Exceeds Expectations," providing space to tell students how they exceeded the standards. I have adapted it here to "Above and Beyond" to make it more open-ended. It can be a place to describe where students have gone beyond the expectations, or it could be a place where the teacher or the student could suggest ways the work could reach even further, a place to set "stretch goals" appropriate to that student's readiness and the task at hand.

Step 2: Distribute the Points

Once my criteria have been defined, and if I will ultimately be giving points for this assignment, I need to decide how to divide those points across each category. Assuming a total of 100 points for this assignment, I would weigh certain components more heavily than others. Because my main goal is for students to write a robust, well-developed story, I would place more value on the top two categories-structure and idea development. This is an area where subjectivity can take over, and where rubrics can really vary from one teacher to another. So again, keep in mind that this is what it looks like for me.

For a 100-point assignment, I might distribute points as follows, adding them right into the rubric with a space for inserting the student's score when the task has been graded:

Step 3: Share the Rubric with Students Ahead of Time

This part is crucial. Even if students are not included in the development of the rubric itself, it's absolutely vital to let them study that rubric before they ever complete the assignment. The rubric loses most of its value if students aren't aware of it until the work is already done, so let them see it ahead of time. I typically provide students with a printed copy of the rubric when we are in the beginning stages of working on a big assignment like this, along with a prompt that describes the task itself.

Step 4: Score Samples

Another powerful step that makes the rubric even more effective is to score sample products as a class, using the rubric as a guide. I often created these samples myself, building in the kinds of problems I often saw in that type of writing. Occasionally I would use a piece of writing from a previous student with their name removed. Ideally, we would score one or two of these as a whole-class activity, and then I would have students do a few more in pairs. This process really gets students paying attention to the rubric, asking questions about the criteria, and getting a much clearer picture of what quality work looks like. When it comes time to craft their own pieces, they are better at using this tool for peer review and self-assessment.

Step 5: Assess Student Work (Round 1)

After students have been given time to plan, draft, and revise their writing-a time when I am watching their work in progress, advising them, and regularly referring to the rubric as a guide-students submit their "finished" pieces for a grade. My feedback for a student who hit many of the marks, but needed work in some areas, might look like this:

I put a check beside the criteria that has been satisfied in that draft, and add comments to the left of those that need work. In the right-hand column, I add a few suggestions for ways this student might push herself a bit more to make the piece even better.

You'll notice that the space for scores has been left blank. There's a reason for that: When students are given both feedback and number or letter grades, their motivation often drops and they tend to ignore the written feedback (Butler & Nisan, 1986). My own experience has proved this to be true; I have often spent hours giving written feedback on student writing, but found they often ignored that. Now I know this was because the feedback also included a grade. No-grades advocate Alfie Kohn, in his piece From Degrading to De-Grading, recommends that teachers who want to avoid this effect "make grades as invisible as possible for as long as possible." With that in mind, in this round, students only get feedback, not scores.

Keep in mind that much of this feedback could be generated with the student, in a conference. If time permits, you could sit with the student and go through the rubric together, noting places that still need work and considering ways to take what's already working and improve it further.

Unless the student has satisfied all the criteria on this first try, she will have an opportunity to revise her work and resubmit it, along with the original rubric. Those who did meet all the standards have the option to revise; not for a higher score (since scores haven't been given), but to simply push the piece to an even higher level of quality.

Step 6: Assess Student Work (Round 2)

When students have improved their work and re-submitted it, if they have gotten much closer to achieving the criteria, this would be an appropriate time to assign points to go into the grade book. If the issues raised in the first round have now been addressed, they are given a check to indicate that they are no longer a problem. In cases where all criteria in a category has been satisfied, the full number of points will be given. If a problem persists, new feedback may be added, and a portion of the points will be deducted. Again, this is the subjective part: I try to consider the work as a whole and deduct only a small percentage of the total points for a small problem. Really, if a problem is significant, the assignment should be reworked until that problem has been resolved. Once each section of the rubric has been scored, the points are totaled and that total is the score that's entered into the grade book.

Q&A About this Process

Will there be a Round 3?
That depends on you and your student. If you feel the student is growing and will put the work in to improve the piece further, and you are willing to assess it again, you should offer another round, and another, if progress is still being made.

Doesn't this process result in most students getting an A on the assignment?
It definitely could. If a student is willing to put the time in to satisfy all the criteria, then she will get the A. Those who are used to getting A's will have the option to push their skills to a higher level in Round 2 or will have the luxury of moving on to something else. It may bother some people that two students who may have different skill levels could end up with the same grade, but behind the scenes, the effort to reach that grade could be very different from student to student.

Isn't this time-consuming?
Heck yeah it is. Well, sort of. For me, this type of assignment would be given over the course of several weeks. By the time I have to actually give points, I have seen that student's piece many times. I have given her informal feedback while she writes and more formal feedback in Round 1, so the time I put into all the stages ultimately results in a final product that's much stronger than it would have been as a quick, one-time thing. And that makes the final assessment process much faster.

Doesn't this result in students being at different stages at different times?
Yes. In many cases, you will find yourself with some students being "done" with an assignment, while others are re-doing it. Most teachers want their students to be learning the same skills at roughly the same time, and unless you are running a very personalized, Montessori-style classroom, you'll want some kind of consistency from student to student. Consider whether you might be willing to spend only part of your class doing the more lock-step, everyone-on-the-same-page kind of work, but set aside other times for students to work on improving past assignments or doing independent work like genius hour projects.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:
References:
Butler, R. & Nisan, M. (1986). Effects of no feedback, task-related comments, and grades on intrinsic motivation and performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78(3), 210-216.

Kohn, Alfie. "From Degrading to De-grading." High School Magazine (1999). Retrieved 19 Aug. 2015 from www.alfiekohn.org/article/degrading-de-grading/.

Like what you've seen so far?
I would love to have you come back for more.Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, you'll get a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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Many teachers are confused about how to convert rubric feedback into grades or points. Even if you are moving away from traditional grades, you still may be required to supply them. Here's my process.

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One of the types of rubrics I have learnt about this year is single point rubrics. It discusses the simplicity of the one column rubric that is being used more in classrooms. The link explores why teachers, students, and parents benefit from single-point rubrics.

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. The simplicity of these rubrics - with just a single column of criteria, rather than a full menu of performance levels - offers a whole host of benefits:

Teachers find them easier and faster to create, because they no longer have to spend precious time thinking up all the different ways students could fail to meet expectations.

Students find them easier to read when preparing an assignment. With only the target expectations to focus on, they are more likely to read those expectations.

They allow for higher-quality feedback, because teachers must specify key problem areas and notable areas of excellence for that particular student, rather than choosing from a list of generic descriptions.

Want to Learn More?

I first talked about this type of rubric in an earlier post ( Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics). If this is the first time you've encountered this type of rubric, reading this will give you some background knowledge on all the different types of rubrics and why the single-point deserves world domination.

To give credit where it's due, I did not come up with the name single point rubric. Although the idea for a simplified rubric with a single set of criteria came to me independently, when I went looking for academic support for its use, I found that the type of rubric I had in mind was given the name "Single Point Rubric" in 2000 during a conference presentation by someone named Mary Dietz. Attending that conference was a researcher named Jarene Fluckiger, who published a study on its effectiveness in 2010. (The reference to Dietz is in Fluckiger's paper, but no one named Dietz has published anything on the topic.)

Show Us Your Rubrics!

I urge you to take one of your most convoluted rubrics and make a single-point version of it. Then show it to the world, so other teachers can learn: Take a screenshot of it and post the picture on Twitter with the hashtag #singlepointrubric. If you aren't on Twitter or don't feel like doing this, just put a link to your rubric in the comments below. Help us start a movement to rid the world of ineffective rubrics!

Another Variation (Added in 2017)

After considering some of the limitations of this format, I played around with the rubric a bit more and came up with this variation:

The original version of the single point rubric allowed no space for actually pointing out when the student hit the standard, apart from maybe circling or highlighting the middle column. With this format, teachers can pinpoint where the student is on each descriptor, then offer feedback, either constructive, positive, or both.

To grab a copy of this for your own modification, click here.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Stick around.
Join my mailing list and never miss another post. You'll get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. Try one for yourself and let us see it!

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In the link above, teachers can learn about this author and educators idea of how to solidify teaching practices. They outlined four ways to achieve this and they are:

Law 1: Keep the GPS on
Law 2: Classify, connect, and compare.
Law 3: To learn, we need to churn.
Law 4: Better to retrieve then to receive.

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Sponsored by Pear Deck and UL Xplorlabs

Teaching is a complex, multifaceted, dynamic profession. New ideas, new tools, and new strategies are coming at you all the time. On top of that, changing circumstances compel you to make adjustments to the way you normally do things.

With all of this spinning around you, it can be hard to find a clear path. There are so many factors that impact student learning, but when it comes to planning lessons-that 45- to 90-minute block of time set aside for instruction-what activities really move the needle on learning? To make those instructional decisions, it helps to have a compass, a set of principles you can return to again and again when you start to feel like you're losing your way.

That's what I have for you here: I looked at the research and managed to condense what I found into four "Laws of Learning," broad guidelines that define solid teaching practices.

I'm certainly not the first person to do this: John Hattie's work to rank various influences on student achievement has been groundbreaking, but I have often felt confused about what some of his terms actually mean. Plus, every time I mention him, I'm met with fierce pushback from people whose understanding of statistics is way more sophisticated than mine. There's also Robert Marzano's high-yield strategies, which I'm a big fan of, but I've learned a few things over the last few years that aren't covered by those.

So here I'm offering my own list, shorter than Marzano's, a LOT shorter than Hattie's, and not nearly as comprehensive. But they're good. And they're backed by research. I'm not putting these out there as THE four laws. They are not the last word on teaching or the only thing you should ever consider when planning a lesson. But they're heavy hitters, and if you find yourself feeling unsure about how to choose between all the different approaches and tools, returning to these four principles will absolutely put you on solid ground.

Law 1: Keep the GPS On

When we go on a trip, many of us use GPS navigation systems, which give us precise information about the route we should follow and how long it will take to get there. These systems give us constant updates along the way, so we always know how much progress we're making.

As teachers, whether or not we provide instructional "GPS" can make a huge difference in how well our students learn. For best results, our instructional GPS should be on in these ways:

Learning Goals and Success Criteria: It's vital to regularly communicate these so students know exactly where they are headed and what it will look like when they reach the goal. Multiple studies report that achievement increases significantly when students understand the learning goals and the criteria for success. (Dean et al., 2012).

Write goals in age-appropriate language and refer to them before, during, and after lessons.

Use rubrics to spell out success criteria. Single-point rubrics work especially well for complex assignments.

Provide models of different levels of success, so students get a clear picture of finished products.

Formative Assessment: Improving formative assessment leads to learning improvements for all students and reduces gaps between low- and high-achievers (Black & Wiliam, 1998).

Make formative assessment truly formative. It's a measurement tool that shouldn't count against a student's grade. Check formative assessments quickly after they are given and use them to make instructional decisions.

Conduct formative assessment in different ways: quizzes, exit slips, class polls, and think-pair-shares are all ways to formatively assess student understanding.

Effective Feedback: Feedback is most effective when it draws attention to positive elements of student performance, addresses the success criteria, includes specific advice on improvement, is presented in small, manageable units, and is given soon after the student attempts the task (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2017; Shute, 2008).

Using Flash Feedback techniques like targeted response and microconferences allows you to give more feedback more efficiently.

Learning improves most when students are given feedback without grades (Black & Wiliam, 1998). A strategy like Kristy Louden's Delaying the Grade allows students to focus on and learn from feedback before they receive grades.

Law 2: Classify, Connect, and Compare

As we learn, our brains are wired to group things into categories (Bruner, 1973; Jensen, 1998). When new information comes in, we sort it, compare it, and try to make sense of it based on similar characteristics. If we can work with this natural tendency in our teaching, we will boost student learning.

These strategies put this law into practice:

Concept Attainment: This strategy has students study Yes and No examples of a concept until they can begin to define that concept, then refine their definition by looking at more examples. Learn more about Concept Attainment here.

Graphic Organizers: Using these naturally gets students to classify, compare, and make connections between concepts. For graphic organizers to work best, teachers should explain their purpose, model their use, and for complex material, partially complete them (Hall & Strangman, 2002). Learn more about graphic organizers here.

Inductive Learning: This strategy has students group chunks of content into categories and label the categories prior to learning about a new topic. Once their minds are primed from doing this work, they are then presented with the content in a more traditional way. Learn more about Inductive Learning here.

Law 3: To Learn, We Need to Churn

Between the time when we introduce skills and knowledge to students and the time when we assess their mastery of those skills and knowledge, they need to process that material in some way.

Some lesson plans call this processing guided practice or independent practice, and these terms make sense if we're talking about skills. They are less logical with knowledge-based content, because you can't "practice" information, but students still need to interact in some way with the material they learn.

To cover all bases, we'll use the term churn, the act of agitating or breaking something up (like liquid in a blender). If we want students to learn something well, we need to give them an opportunity to churn that material up.

Here are just a few ways to add churn to your lessons:

Movement: Adding gestures to learning activities results in more enduring learning (Cook et al., 2010), and physical activity is correlated with improved academic performance (Donnelly & Lambourne, 2011). This post covers many different ways to add movement to instruction.

Note-Taking: A lot of research supports the use of note-taking to boost learning ( summarized here). Look for opportunities to add note-taking to your instruction.

Cooperative Learning: Having students work cooperatively consistently yields higher levels of achievement than either competitive or independent learning (Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec, 1994). Some great cooperative learning strategies are Jigsaw, Reciprocal Learning, and Chat Stations.

Law 4: Better to Retrieve than Receive

In so many teaching situations, our instinct is often to push information into students' brains. And although it is absolutely necessary for students to take in the material in order to learn it, and to "churn" it as we covered in Law 3, once the information has been delivered and processed, there are other things we can do to make sure that information is locked into long-term memory.

When it's time to study our material-to review it for a test, for example-what many teachers and students tend to do is simply re-read it. Teachers prepare study guides with bulleted lists or study concepts, and students review their notes or readings.

A much more effective approach to studying is retrieval practice. Retrieval practice is the act of recalling information without the aid of a text; in other words, quizzing ourselves on the material. The more we can build retrieval practice into our instruction, the better our students will get at recalling the information and concepts we're trying to teach them. ( Learn more here.)

Here are some ways to add retrieval practice to your classroom:

Low-Stakes Quizzes: Give students regular quizzes on your course content. Because these quizzes are meant to be practice, they should either be ungraded or given a minimal amount of points.

Flashcards: Teach students how to create and study flashcards, then set aside class time for them to study.

Brain Dumps: Give students a few minutes to write down everything they can remember about a topic they've learned in your class, then let them check their response for accuracy and completeness with the text, a classmate, or both.

Go Deeper

My online mini-course, 4 Laws of Learning, is a self-paced course that helps you really learn these principles and apply them to your teaching.

Here's what the course includes:

Four video-based modules, one for each law, with detailed explanations of specific strategies for implementing the law in your practice

More research to support each of the four laws

Guided notes you can work with while you watch the modules

A quiz after each module to check your understanding

A reflection at the end of each module to help you make specific plans for applying the laws in your own teaching

A tools for remote learning feature that lists tools you can use to apply each law in remote teaching situations

A 22-page PDF of summary notes that includes all the key points from the course and a full bibliography of the research.

The course is available to single users, groups of five or ten, or a whole-school license if you want it for every teacher in your building. Learn more about the course here.

References

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2017). Spotlight: Reframing feedback to improve teaching and learning. https://www.aitsl.edu.au/docs/default-source/research-evidence/spotlight/spotlight-feedback.pdf

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998, October 1). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan Online. https://kappanonline.org/inside-the-black-box-raising-standards-through-classroom-assessment/

Bruner, J. (1973). Beyond the information given: Studies in the psychology of knowing. W.W. Norton.

Cook, S. W., Yip, T. K., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2010). Gesturing makes memories that last. Journal of memory and language, 63(4), 465-475.

Dean, C. B., Hubbell, E. R., Pitler, H., & Stone, B. (2012). Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback. ASCD. http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/111001/chapters/Setting-Objectives-and-Providing-Feedback.aspx

Donnelly, J. E., & Lambourne, K. (2011). Classroom-based physical activity, cognition, and academic achievement. Preventive Medicine, 52, S36-S42.

Jensen, E. (1998). Teaching with the brain in mind. ASCD.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R.T., & Holubec, E.J. (1994). New circles of learning: Cooperation in the classroom and school. ASCD.

Shute, V. J. (2008). Focus on formative feedback. Review of Educational Research, 78(1), 153-189. http://myweb.fsu.edu/vshute/pdf/shute%202008_b.pdf

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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4 Laws of Learning (and How to Follow Them)

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Sponsored by Pear Deck and UL Xplorlabs Teaching is a complex, multifaceted, dynamic profession. New ideas, new tools, and new strategies are coming at you all the time. On top of that, changing circumstances compel you to make adjustments to the way you normally do things.

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Here I have linked a website that allows teachers to download 20+ exit slip templates!

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This video above shows flexibility within the classroom. Allowing students to chose where they want to sit is important for students success. If I have a student who prefers to work individually, they may chose to work in their desk. If I have students who work and learn better in a group they may chose to work on the couch. I may have a student that has a lack of social skills that prefers to work in the egg chair on their own. This video shows the benefits of providing choice in seating to students.

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Flexible Classrooms: Providing the Learning Environment That Kids Need

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At Albemarle County Public Schools, flexible classrooms empower student choice, increase student engagement, and improve student participation.

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Benefits of Flexible Seating in the Classroom

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Benefits of Flexible Seating in the Classroom

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This link discusses why flexible seating is beneficial to students and provides them choices regarding their learning.

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A middle school teacher shares the benefits of giving students voice and choice in their learning environment.

Courtesy of Brooke Markle

The author's classroom, ready to go for the new year.

Changes to a learning environment are often driven by the teacher's philosophy regarding how students learn best. When I decided to remove the student desks from my grade 7 English classroom for the last school year, I was motivated to do so after observing the way my students learned and analyzing how I could best support them in that learning.

According to the NEA article " Understanding Universal Design in the Classroom," the learning space is an important aspect of the whole educational experience: "One cannot have a community of learners without having a positive instructional climate. Instructors help to create this climate by everything that they do, from the way they respond to student questions to the arrangement of the classroom chairs." For my students, traditional seating hindered their ability to use the classroom in the ways they needed to accomplish the learning goals I set for them as modern learners.

The classroom environment should mirror what students will encounter in their future careers, and collaboration, problem solving, and meaning making are at the forefront of most job descriptions. Standard desks situated in rows do not foster open communication and collaboration. Before I moved the desks out of my classroom, I had typically arranged them in partners or small groups to try to facilitate conversation, but traditional desks in groups didn't foster the personalized, collaborative learning environment my students craved.

My Journey With Flexible Seating

Once I started researching options to shift the classroom environment, I was careful not to attempt a "Pinterest perfect" classroom and instead maintained focus on the purpose of flexible seating: allowing students a voice and a choice within their classroom. I incorporated various types of seating at different levels throughout the room, and students were able to find workspaces where comfort met capability.

Since I wrote about changing my room a year ago, educators from across the country have reached out with questions regarding how to manage flexible seating in a middle school classroom. Middle school students offer a unique challenge since they are in the midst of adolescence, which brings with it a great deal of change for them. I've answered questions on everything from student feedback, funding, parental concerns, and planning for substitutes to basic logistics and materials. There are many ways to address these questions-in the end, a classroom environment is all about the needs of the students within the room.

Although I started last school year with no traditional desks in my classroom, I did have traditional options available, such as standard tables with ergonomic plastic chairs. I tried to be sensitive to the needs of all the learners-many students enjoy nontraditional seating options, yet an equal number prefer a standard learning space.

Last year I used student feedback surveys in each marking period to determine "home base" seats for my students-where they sit each day for attendance and initial instruction. Having home base seats helped with the distractions and confusion that come with transitions between classes.

I also asked whether they wanted any traditional desks-the answer was no-and if they had opinions about the placement of furniture. This feedback was really helpful, especially with multiple classes using the room every day.

I made changes to the classroom several times throughout the school year based on what my students suggested, which I strongly believe was a key component to the success of the pilot program. My classroom was in fact their classroom, and being responsive to their changing needs was critical.

As summer ends and I think about the furniture I have in my classroom and the new items I acquired through various local grant opportunities, I'm planning multiple placement options for each piece.

The Benefits I Saw

One benefit of flexible seating that I didn't anticipate was that when I incorporated station work and students moved to new seats to work with a new group, they seemed more open to collaborating with an assortment of peers in a variety of locations than had been the case with traditional seating.

I admired the way my students took an active role in their educational journey when provided with a choice as small as where they preferred to complete an assignment. As the NEA article notes, "Students know how they learn best. Give them credit for the knowledge they bring to the classroom, and make them partners in the creation of a positive instructional climate."

Students are completely capable of doing their best work while stretched out on the classroom floor, sitting in an Adirondack chair, or even curled into a tire seat. I've been amazed at the discussions that occurred among my students and the ease with which they shared writing samples and ideas about literary questions with an array of peers.

Flexible seating is about more than simply having a variety of different, fun seats in the classroom. It's about utilizing student voice, creating buy-in, heightening collaborative learning, and prioritizing students' needs concerning the environment in which they learn.

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Reflections on Shifting to a Flexible Classroom

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A middle school teacher shares the benefits of giving students voice and choice in their learning environment.

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How to Integrate Effective Feedback into the Classroom

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How to Integrate Effective Feedback into the Classroom

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In both my five week practicum and my education classes in third year, I have learnt that feedback in the classroom should be direct and effective. I found it difficult to make sure my feedback was effective and useful for my students. This link has helped me understand and deliver feedback that my students can take and apply it to their work.

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What is feedback?

Feedback is information provided (by the teacher, a peer, a book or computer program or an experience) about aspects of a student's performance or the knowledge they have built up from a learning experience. Learners can use feedback to confirm, overwrite, fine tune or restructure existing knowledge, beliefs and strategies.

Why is feedback important?

Research suggests that appropriate, constructive and assessment-based feedback is one of the most critical features of effective teaching and learning. In a meta-analysis of over 800 studies, Hattie (2009) found feedback was the most important teacher practice in improving student learning. Feedback supports students to know where and how to improve, and it can support their motivation to invest effort in making improvements. It is an integral part of Assessment for Learning.

Well-timed feedback can support cognitive processes for better performance, including confirming or restructuring understanding, improving strategies, guiding students to more information, and suggesting directions and/or alternative strategies they could pursue in order to improve. Feedback can also engage students in metacognitive strategies such as goal setting, task planning, monitoring, and reflection, which are important skills for self-regulated learning. Feedback can influence students' affective processes, improving effort, motivation and engagement.

What kind of feedback do students need?

Feedback improves learning when it focuses on the particular qualities of the student's work, with specific guidance on what the student can do to improve.

Feedback should be user-friendly (specific and personalised), transparent, addressable, timely, ongoing, and content-rich. It also needs to be clear, purposeful, and compatible with students' existing knowledge, while providing little threat to self-esteem.

The best kinds of feedback:
* are goal-referenced: linked to, and assisting understanding of, the goals of learning
* are matched to the needs of the students, with the level of support they need
* are accurate and trustworthy (with teachers and students in agreement about what counts as success)
* are carefully timed: provided when students need it to improve learning (which might be during the learning activity, or before revising a piece of work)
* focus on strengths and weaknesses as well as revealing what students understand and misunderstand, and accompanied with strategies to help the student improve
* emphasise correct rather than incorrect responses
* focus on changes from previous work or understanding
* guide ongoing learning
* are directed towards enhanced self-efficacy and more effective self-regulation
* are two-way conversations (either written dialogue or oral) rather than one-way
* are used in conjunction with self and/or peer assessment
* do not threaten self-esteem
* are checked for clarity, adequacy and effectiveness with the student - "Does this feedback help?"
* are actionable - with the student given time to respond to and act on feedback.

Three stages to effective feedback

1. Feed-up: Before feedback can be given, students need to know the learning intention(s). Feed-up clarifies for the student Where am I going? What are the goals? This information sets the context for feedback.

2. Feedback: Feedback itself focuses on monitoring and assessing learning progression in relation to the learning intention or task. It is about How am I doing? What progress is being made towards the goals?

3. Feed-forward: This relates to the next steps required for improvement on a specific task or learning intention. It is about Where to next? What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress? Here the answer is likely to be directed to the refinement of goals, and seeking more challenging goals, because these are most likely to lead to greater achievement.

Effective feedback is when teachers and students address all three of these questions.

Three levels of feedback

Feedback operates on, or can be geared towards, three levels. These are:

1: Task-level (or product) feedback
Feedback aimed at the task or product describes students' performance and may offer students directions on how to acquire more, different or correct information.
Example: "That is correct. Could you include more information about the Treaty of Versailles?"
Immediate feedback is likely to be most effective for task-level feedback.
Task-level feedback is not the most powerful kind. This is because feedback at the task level is not usually generalisable to other tasks. However, this level of feedback can be effective when the information it provides about the task is later used for improving strategies or self-regulation. For example, task-level feedback might help students to reject incorrect interpretations and provide directions for better ways to process and understand the material.
Too much feedback at the task level focused on the accuracy of responses, and not on the processing required for these responses, can direct students' attention away from a higher-level understanding of their task performance, and focus them instead on a surface understanding of learning involving acquisition, storage and reproduction of knowledge.

2: Process-level feedback
Feedback aimed at the process of understanding focuses on how the student has completed a task or created a product.
Example: "You might find it easier to punctuate this page if you read it aloud with a peer."
Process-level feedback is particularly powerful for improving students' deep processing and mastery of tasks and directing students towards more effective task strategies. It provides a deeper understanding of learning, enabling students to appreciate relationships between strategies and performance, which helps them to transfer skills to more difficult or unfamiliar tasks.
Process-level feedback on metacognitive processes might focus on enhancing students' self-efficacy, self-regulatory skills or confidence to engage further on a task.
Example: "You already know the key features for introducing an argument, check to see that you have incorporated them into your first paragraph."
Feedback focused on cognitive or metacognitive processes is most effective when there is a delay between student performance and feedback, which enables better reflection.

3: Personal-level feedback
Feedback focused on the personal level is directed to the self and contains little task-related information.
Example: "That's an intelligent response, well done."
This is the least effective level of feedback as it rarely leads to more engagement, enhanced self-efficacy or better understanding of the task. In fact, praise often directs attention away from the task. When feedback draws attention to the self, students have a high fear of failure, and it becomes risky for students to tackle challenging tasks or to try hard. However, sometimes praise focused on the student's effort, self-regulation and engagement can assist in enhancing self-efficacy and increase student motivation.
Summary: Feedback that is designed to move students from the task to the underlying processes or understandings and then to self-regulation is most effective. For example, feedback based at task performance can build students' confidence and help them to feel more able to improve and experiment with strategy use. Then questioning and feedback can focus on learning strategies and metacognitive skills, which eventually help students to become self-regulating learners. These are the students that seek and give their own feedback!
How to improve feedback practices in your classroom

Ten ways to give better feedback

1. Give more quality feedback by reducing the number of pieces of work you assess. Spend more time on selected pieces of work to give thoughtful, constructive and appropriate feedback. To make time for this, teachers do not mark some pieces, or look at only a third of their students' books each week, or engage students in peer and self-assessment of some tasks.

2. Automate as many classroom processes as you can in order to devote more of your thinking to feedback. When teachers automate many other tasks in the classroom and enable students to take most of the responsibility for their learning and learning activity, they are able to devote more time and thought to giving sensitive, timely, content-rich feedback that is well-matched to the students' learning needs at that moment.

3. Be descriptive and refrain from evaluation or advice. Approach giving feedback by carefully observing and commenting on what has been observed, based on the learning intentions of the work or activity. For example, "The first few paragraphs kept my full attention, because the scene painted was vivid and interesting. But then the dialogue became hard to follow, and as a reader, I was confused about who was talking, so I became less engaged." Such feedback informs the student of their performance, without making value judgements, and offers direction for improvement, while leaving the responsibility to decide how to improve with the student.

4. Focus feedback on questions that challenge students. In topics where there are few right answers, try to use questions in your feedback that support students to tease out their assumptions or be critical about the quality of arguments.

5. Take into account students' affective beliefs. Students tend to interpret feedback according to their beliefs about their strengths and weaknesses which can sometimes distort the message the feedback was intended to convey. Students who have high levels of confidence in the accuracy of their response pay little attention to affirmative feedback (unless the response turns out to be incorrect, which focuses their attention on feedback). Similarly, students who expect their response to be wrong, and it turns out to be wrong, also largely ignore the accompanying feedback. Teachers need to plan their feedback to reinforce or challenge students' assumptions about themselves as learners. Teachers need to consider the ways and manner in which individuals interpret feedback so that feedback supports students in developing positive and valuable concepts of themselves and their learning.

6. Enhance the impact of feedback on student motivation. Students are more likely to increase effort when learning goals are clear, meaningful, and when their self-belief in their ability to succeed is high. Feedback that attributes success to effort rather than a student's ability to succeed tends to be more successful. This is because attributing success to one's ability suggests that effort is not required or is unlikely to alter students' ability to succeed.

7. Create an environment for learning which welcomes errors and corrective feedback. Feedback is most effective in learning environments where students are comfortable in making mistakes and where errors are seen as leading to future learning. If students perceive personal risk to responding in class and receiving negative feedback, they are less likely to engage in learning, and are more likely to reject or ignore feedback. Show students the benefits of (self-generated, peer-generated and teacher-generated) feedback to their learning. Teach error-detection strategies to students so that students can provide themselves with self-generated feedback.

8. Give students ownership of their own learning. When students have some autonomy and control, and feel accountable for their learning, they are often more receptive to seeking, accepting and using feedback information.

9. Consider cultural preferences. As well as individual preferences, students' preferences for the type and delivery of feedback may differ according to their culture. Students from individualist cultures (e.g. Europe, USA, Pākehā NZ) prefer direct feedback that is individually focused, and are more likely to seek feedback. Students from collectivist cultures (e.g. Confucian-based Asia, South Pacific nations) prefer indirect and implicit feedback, focused at the group rather than the individual level, with no feedback directed to at the personal level. However, bear in mind that when feedback is given at the group level, students may find it difficult to differentiate which feedback messages are relevant to them.

10. Involve everyone in the class (including visitors and parents) in giving and receiving feedback: Feedback does not always need to come from the teacher, or even from people! Widening the range of sources of feedback ensures students receive lots of timely feedback. However, the quality and accuracy of feedback is also important. Students can be taught the features of effective feedback, beyond immature criticisms and unhelpful praise, and simple proformas can be designed to elicit useful feedback from a range of peers and non-peers.

Ineffective feedback to avoid

Giving marks or grades
Students tend not to pay attention to feedback comments when they are given a mark or grade. Students who get low marks twice in a row come to expect to get low marks every time, with a negative impact on both motivation and achievement.

Comparisons with other students
Competitive environments also have a negative impact on motivation and achievement. Rather than comparing individuals against the performance of a class, a fairer comparison pits each student's current performance against their own previous performance. This comparison is seen as relevant and achievable, whereas trying to compete with peers is stressful for many students.

Extrinsic rewards
These undermine students taking responsibility for themselves, increase teacher control and surveillance, and generate competition amongst students.

Non-specific or general feedback
Telling students to work harder, or recalculate, does not help students know how or where to improve their work. Unclear evaluative feedback, which details students' successes and failures but does not specify reasons, is likely to have negative effects on self-efficacy, exacerbate poor performance and damage self-images.

Giving feedback unrelated to critical aspects of learning goals
Feedback should be clearly focused on the learning goals and agreed success criteria for meeting these goals. Students should not be given feedback on presentation, spelling and/or the quantity of writing when the learning goal is "creating mood in a story".

Overloading students with too much or too technical information
It is better to identify one important thing that you noticed, that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement

Too much written feedback
Giving too much feedback in written form can be overwhelming for students and difficult to understand. Some students have difficulty understanding and processing written feedback. However, this can be mitigated by good communication between the teacher and student in which the student is invited to say if feedback is not useful or doesn't help them to make improvements.

Associating "what next?" with more
Often teachers suggest that students gather more information, or perform more tasks, so that students come to understand that the answer to "Where to next?" is "more". Instead, feedback can provide information on greater possibilities for learning, including enhanced challenges, more autonomy over the learning process, greater fluency, and diversifying strategies and processes for tasks.

Giving feedback when students lack knowledge or information
Feedback can only build on existing learning or understanding. Students with very little understanding of a content area are more likely to benefit from targeted instruction than from feedback on poorly constructed concepts. Feedback is better focused on faulty interpretations and fine-tuning performance.

Feedback checklist

How often does your feedback include the features in our Feedback checklist?

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How to integrate effective feedback into your classroom - THE EDUCATION HUB

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A detailed overview of effective feedback, and how to improve the nature of the feedback you give your students

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Tips for Providing Students with Meaningful Feedback

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Tips for Providing Students with Meaningful Feedback

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In this link, teachers can see five researched based tips for providing students with meaningful feedback. Reading this article has allowed me to look at how I have given feedback in the past and alter it in a way that will benefit my students in a better way.

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Self assessment is a good tool to use in the classroom. In this link, teachers can see five quick self assessment ideas that will keep students engaged in their learning.

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5 Quick and Simple Student Self Assessment Ideas - 3P Learning

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Student self-assessment is a fun and powerful way for you and your students to understand their confidence and knowledge of mathematical concepts.

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The article above gives ideas about classroom examples of summative assessment. It explores the difference between summative and formative assessment. It also provides readers with different situations on when to and when to not use summative assessment.

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Summative assessment is a type of achievmeent assessment that occurs at the end of a unit of work. Its goal is to evaluate what students have learned or the skills they have developed. It is

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This link shows teachers six ways to ensure that assessment is fair and unbiased. Although teachers should sometimes consider the student when assessing. However, in many cases, students identify should be hidden as the teacher is assessing their work.

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No one wants to use an assessment tool with obvious stereotyping or offensive material, of course. But it's easy to assess in ways that inadvertently favor some students over others. Effective assessment processes yield evidence and conclusions that are meaningful, appropriate, and fair to all relevant subgroups of students (Lane, 2012; Linn, Baker, & Dunbar, 1991). The following tips minimize the possibility of inequities.

1. Don't rush.

Assessments that are thrown together at the last minute invariably include flaws that greatly affect the fairness, accuracy, and usefulness of the resulting evidence.

2. Plan your assessments carefully.

Aim not only to access your key learning goals but to do so in a balanced, representative way. If your key learning goals are that students should understand what happened during a certain historical period and evaluate the decisions made by key figures during that period, for example, your test should balance questions on basic conceptual understanding with questions assessing evaluation skills.

3. Aim for assignments and questions that are crystal clear.

If students find the question difficult to understand, they may answer what they think is the spirit of the question rather than the question itself, which may not match your intent.

4. Guard against unintended bias.

A fair and unbiased assessment uses contexts that are equally familiar to all and uses words that have common meanings to all. A test question on quantitative skills that asks students to analyze football statistics might not be fair to women, and using scenarios involving farming may be biased against students from urban areas, unless you are specifically assessing student learning in these contexts.

5. Ask a variety of people with diverse perspectives to review assessment tools.

This helps ensure that the tools are clear, that they appear to assess what you want them to, and that they don't favor students of a particular background.

6. Try out large-scale assessment tools.

If you are planning a large-scale assessment with potentially significant consequences, try out your assessment tool with a small group of students before launching the large-scale implementation. Consider asking some students to think out loud as they answer a test question; their thought processes should match up with the ones you intended. Read students' responses to assignments and open-ended survey questions to make sure their answers make sense, and ask students if anything is unclear or confusing.

Excerpted and adapted from Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide, 3rd Edition by Linda Suskie. Copyright © 2018, Wiley. All rights reserved.

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6 Ways to Ensure Your Assessment Practices are Fair and Unbiased

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No one wants to use an assessment tool with obvious stereotyping or offensive material, of course. But it's easy to assess in ways that inadvertently favor some students over others. Effective assessment processes yield evidence and conclusions that are meaningful, appropriate, and fair to all relevant subgroups of students (Lane, 2012; Linn, Baker, & Dunbar, 1991 ).

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4 Types of Differentiation - Special Topics

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4 Types of Differentiation - Special Topics

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In our differentiation class, our professor gave us a document that shows us the four types of differentiation. With each, there are different examples on how to differentiate for environment, content, process, and product. This is important for assessment because I cannot fairly assess until my students are properly differentiated.

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Content and Product examples for lesson 2

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Standardized tests can be stressful for students, as well as just regular tests are often stressful. This may because of the lack of tests done during Covid-19 or the lack of test prep done in their classrooms. This website will provide me with three test taking strategies that I can teach my students to ace their tests and not have so much stress around test taking.

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Here are three basic test-taking strategies that elementary students should review prior to testing. Plus, download 10 free printable test-taking strategies resources that can be shared with students or hung in the elementary classroom.

Strategy 1: Review the Different Question Formats

To be successful on exams students must be familiar with the different question formats and feel comfortable moving between a scantron and their test packet.

A week or so before a high-stakes test, use specific test preparation strategies and handouts to review the different questions students will see on the exam.

It's always a good idea to review and practice multiple-choice (selected-response) strategies before an assessment. On multiple-choice tests, the vocabulary and layout of the answers can confuse students.

These are my six tips to help students feel like they Multiple-Choice Champions before a big test:

1. Reread the question. Make sure you understand what is being asked.

2. Come up with an answer to the question before looking at the list of choices.

3. Read ALL of the answers and cross out the choices that don't make sense.

4. Underline the section in the text or question that supports your reasoning.

5. Look carefully at similar-sounding answers. Find the more precise answer.

6. Select "All of the above" if two or three answers seem correct.

Download the Be A Multiple-Choice Champion Tip Sheet and hang it up in your classroom on the day of an exam. I guarantee your students will look at the poster sometime during the testing period to boost their confidence and recall strategies for answering multiple-choice questions.

Most schools have an acronym they use school-wide to help their students with open-ended responses. If your school has not adopted an acronym that is used throughout the school, I highly recommend you do. It promotes consistency as the students move from grade level to grade level. The acronym we use at my school is ACE:

Answer the question:

Turn the question into your answer and answer it

Cite an example:

Give a specific example from the text to support your answer

Extend your thinking

Give another example OR state another thought about the text that supports your answer

Help students remember how to answer open-ended responses with the ACE Open-Ended Responses Tip Sheet.

Finally, I review simple strategies that students can use to attack any question.

For older students, I have a list of suggestions for answering the various types of questions from multiple-choice to essay prompts.

For younger grades, I use a fabulous handout that delves into some of the strategies I discuss when reviewing multiple-choice questions and gives students concrete examples to look over.

This resource will show students the following strategies to puzzle out questions they may find confusing. It highlights the following strategies:

1. Substitute each answer in the blank

2. Justify answers my underlining information from the passage

3. Cross out answers that don't make sense

Strategy 2: Strengthen Student Vocabulary

Unfamiliar vocabulary in a literary text or a standardized test can confuse and/or discourage students.

Make sure your students are armed with the vocabulary strategies they need to come out victorious rather than feeling defeated after taking a test. Below are word strategy resources to ensure students come out on top!

Here are 10 terms students should know heading into a standardized test (words may vary depending on your state test). Download the 10 ELA Test Terms To Know Reference Sheet and review the words with students until you're confident they understand their meaning.

A similar download you may find useful is the 10 High-Stakes Test Terms to Know Poster. Teachers should incorporate these terms into classroom activities and should clarify how best to answer each question stem while the stakes are low.

For example, a teacher could ask an introductory question such as

"Infer from the reading on page 3 how Jimmy felt about his friends."

"Compare the reading we did for homework with the passage on the board."

"Analyze how Martha came to make the decision she did."

The last strategy/handout teaches students how to break down individual words and puzzle out their meanings. Here's an example using the word submersible:

STEP 1: BREAK THE WORD INTO SMALLER PARTS. LOOK FOR THE PARTS OF THE WORD YOU KNOW.

Submersible → sub mersible

What does the word sub make you think of?

You can investigate even further by asking, "Do subways and submarines have anything in common?"

Both are used for transportation and traveling from one point to another

Both are underground

STEP 2: LOOK FOR THE CONTEXT CLUES. WHAT DO THEY TELL YOU?

" Explorer, the submersible watercraft, sank deeper into the ocean."

From the passage clues, we know that:

Submersible is describing a feature of the watercraft.

The watercraft can travel deep into the ocean.

STEP 3: USE YOUR BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE.

I know a sub or submarine travels underwater.

The passage says, "...sank deeper into the ocean."
You can conclude that submersible means a vessel or vehicle that is capable of traveling and operating underwater.
This example is a great resource to share with students as a handout or you can hang up the poster on the classroom wall. Once students have reviewed this strategy, assign them words to break down using these three steps.

Strategy 3: Use Practice Prompts

As a literacy specialist, there are a few "key literary elements" that I make sure to emphasize in my teaching because I know they will help my students perform well.

Fortunately, these "key literary elements" support strong reading comprehension and should be focused on even if there were no standardized tests to be taken.

Available for download are reading practice prompts for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry texts. Download Sample Reading Prompts for Standardized Test Preparation for grades 3-5 now.

In Conclusion

Standardized tests can be stressful for students and teachers. Hopefully, these test-taking strategies for elementary students and accompanying resources will relieve some of the anxiety.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Vocab Gal's Favorite
Test Prep Resources

Strategies for Answering
Math Questions

Test-Taking Strategies Poster

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3 Test-Taking Strategies for Elementary Students (Includes 10+ Printables)

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Here are three basic test-taking strategies that elementary students should review prior to testing. Plus, download 10 free printable test-taking strategies resources that can be shared with students or hung in the elementary classroom. To be successful on exams students must be familiar with the different question formats and feel comfortable moving between a scantron and their test packet.

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The link above goes over 15 possible reasons why standardized testing does not benefit students. The link outlines possible negative affects on students mental health, friendships, ideas with all types of testing, and overall grade. Familiarizing myself with these reasons will allow me to create a test that keeps these problematic ideas in mind, ensuring to leave these ideas out of my tests.

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15 Reasons Why Standardized Tests are Problematic

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It’s wonderful to see all the protests around the country against standardized testing. At Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington, teachers are refusing to administer the Measures of Academic Pro

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In this link, I can find 20 different ideas for exit slips. The link discusses different exit slips for digital exit slips, paper exit slips, and interactive exit slips. This will provide me with an alternative delivery of exit slips.

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Class is done. We've learned a lot. We've tried some new things. We've had some great discussions.

So ... now what?

How can we make the most of the end of class? How can we tie a bow on a day of class to wrap everything up?

An exit ticket gives us that opportunity - much like bell-ringer activities help us kick class off effectively.

The name "exit ticket" makes it sound like you need a ticket to exit the room, but exit tickets are final quick check-ins with students before class wraps up.

What can we do with exit tickets?

In an article in the publication Educational Leadership by ASCD, Robert Marzano explains that there are four kinds of prompts teachers often use with exit slips - prompts that ...

Provide formative assessment data (How would you rate your current level of understanding of what we did today?)

Stimulate student analysis (How hard did you work today? What could you have done to help yourself learn better?)

Focus on instructional strategies (How did the group work today help you understand the content?)

Are open communications to the teacher (What could I do differently to help you understand better?)

Exit tickets are also a research-based best practice for several reasons ...

Exit tickets are a pretty versatile tool. We can use exit tickets one day as formative assessment and on another day to check in on students' feelings to learning.

Armed with this data, it can inform your instruction instantly - as soon as the next day or even later on in that same day!

So ... what does this look like in a classroom? What digital tools can help us with exit tickets? I have 10 ideas for both!

BONUS: The Exit Ticket Builder for Google Slides and PowerPoint

Having some ideas for exit ticket prompts can save you time AND help you remix them to meet the needs of your students.

Here I'll share 10 exit ticket prompts ... but let's take it a step further!

These prompts are part of my FREE Exit Ticket Builder template for Google Slides and PowerPoint! With this template, you can quickly add any of the 20 pre-made exit ticket prompts to your slide deck -- then assign it to students.

Flip through the slides below to see all the exit ticket ideas in the Exit Ticket Builder.

Then, make a copy in Google Slides or PowerPoint to assign to your students!

10 ideas for exit ticket prompts

Here are 10 exit ticket prompt ideas that you can use to wrap up your class ...

1. Do you agree or disagree with the topic today? Describe why. If you're studying a topic that has two or more sides, this lets the student decide where he/she stands and why.

2. How are you doing? Just a simple social-emotional check-in can give the teacher valuable information and help the student to feel seen and heard.

10 digital tools for exit tickets

The traditional way of doing exit tickets is with slips of paper. That's totally fine. But we do have plenty of digital options that give us variety.

The great thing about many of these is that you can re-use them. For many, you can create them once and use the same (or similar) questions and templates without having to reinvent the wheel.

Here are some digital tools and ideas for using them for using digital exit tickets in the classroom.

1. Socrative

Use Socrative ( socrative.com) for to ask a quick question or do a quick poll at the end of class. The quick question option lets you ask a super-fast open-ended or multiple choice question. Plus, Socrative has a built-in exit ticket option, asking students ...

how well they understood the day's lesson (multiple choice)

what they learned (open-ended)

to answer an additional question from the teacher, maybe one you ask verbally (open-ended)

Benefits: It's fast and summarizes your info quickly on one screen.

2. Google Forms

Creating a quick Google Form ( forms.google.com) can let you customize your exit ticket experience. Building your exit ticket with Forms, Google's survey tool, lets you add a variety of question types. Plus, you can also display videos, images and text. The drag and drop interface of Google Forms makes it pretty easy to pull together an exit ticket. When you're done, use the "Send" button to give your students a link. View results in the "Responses" tab and even export them to a spreadsheet.

Benefits: You get more question types and multimedia. You can view graphs of responses quickly.

3. Pear Deck

Pear Deck ( peardeck.com) works with slide presentation tools (easiest, in my opinion: Google Slides, with the Pear Deck add-on) to make slides interactive. Have a quick slide deck pre-created for the end of class. Design slides visually - or use the pre-created slides in Pear Deck's slide library in the Google Slides add-on. Students interact on their screen, drawing, dragging and typing. Pear Deck has a paid premium version, but there's a lot you can do with its free version.

Benefits: Questions are visual, hands-on and interactive.

4. Flipgrid

Using Flipgrid ( flipgrid.com) as an exit ticket means you get to see and hear your students via video. Create a simple prompt. Give your students a link to it - or assign it in Google Classroom - or provide students the QR code to answer it. Students respond in their browser (or with the mobile app). It's one thing to see text on a screen. It's another to be able to read your students' body language and vocal intonation.

Benefits: You can learn more from watching how your students answer via video sometimes.

5. Synth

Like the idea of video responses but prefer to respond with audio? Synth ( gosynth.com) makes responding with your voice digitally feel like a conversation. Students can leave short audio responses to a question - perfect for exit tickets. But they can also respond to each other's recordings, making it feel more like an asynchronous conversation over time.

Benefits: This lets you hear your students' voices - and lets them practice answering with their voices.

6. Kahoot!

You're likely familiar with this classroom staple by now. We often use Kahoot! ( kahoot.com) for reviewing. However, we can also use it for exit tickets. Create a new survey Kahoot! instead of the traditional quiz game. Surveys still have multiple choices, but they aren't scored. It takes the competitive edge off and lets students be more thoughtful with their answers.

Benefits: It uses a familiar interface that students likely connect to having fun. Plus, students can answer quickly and easily.

7. Google Slides

Google Slides is for way more than oral presentations in front of class! Create a new slide presentation and share it with students, making it "everyone can edit". ( Instructions in this blog post.) Each student gets a slide on the slide deck for responding. Give students a question or prompt to respond to at the end of class. Note that everyone can see everyone's slides, so this wouldn't be ideal for fact recall or for sensitive personal questions. Because of the design freedom in Google Slides, it opens up what students can create for you quickly!

Benefits: The design tools mean students can quickly make something visual with text, images, lines, shapes, etc.

8. Formative

Formative ( goformative.com) is like using Google Forms in some ways. But it offers even more flexibility. There are TONS of question types. One of my favorites is the "Show Your Work" question where students draw their answers. If you ask multiple-choice questions, it will autograde the responses.

Benefits: Have students draw their answers using the "Show Your Work" question type.

9. Poll Everywhere

Using Poll Everywhere ( polleverywhere.com) lets you create a quick poll with lots of options. You can add images to your polls and even rank items instead of just choosing one.

Benefits: Ask students to rank multiple items.

10. Seesaw

Teachers love Seesaw ( seesaw.me) because it creates a digital learning community. It's a bit like social media (think Facebook) for the classroom. For exit tickets, students can post to their Seesaw classroom and snap a picture of what they've been working on. They can even annotate it by drawing and labeling.

Benefits: Marking up images can help students show what they know.

Exit tickets that DON'T use technology

Technology opens up lots of opportunities to assess, create and gather data in unique ways.

That doesn't mean we HAVE to use technology, though. Sometimes, the data we want to gather can be done faster - or more meaningfully - without technology.

Here are some ideas:

The sticky note mosaic: Grab a few pads of sticky notes of different colors. Tell students what each color stands for: something that know for sure, something they're still unclear on, something they need to tell the teacher, etc. Stick the sticky notes on the board randomly or in groups as they leave. The colors will help you sort them quickly.

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20 ideas for exit tickets in the classroom

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Class is done. How can we end it effectively? Using digital exit tickets can bring closure to your day. Here are 10 you can use tomorrow.

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This link discusses the importance of using exit slips in the classroom. It explores the different ways teachers can use exit slips.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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14 Ways to Give Students Meaningful Feedback

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14 Ways to Give Students Meaningful Feedback

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This link shows teachers 14 ways to give students meaningful feedback in the classroom. Teachers often give feedback that is not beneficial to students learning journey. However, this link is here to help me give my students meaningful feedback that will benefit how they learn and do their school work.

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14 Ways to Give Students Meaningful Feedback

If you've ever spent time around toddlers learning to walk, you've probably noticed an odd phenomenon: when they lose their balance and fall to the ground, they usually look to the grown-ups before deciding how to react.

Often, if their grown-up shows signs of distress or worry, the toddler will become upset themselves and start to cry. But if the grown-ups are cheerful, encouraging, and confident, those toddlers will usually get right back up and start walking again.

Why? Because they've learned from the reactions of those around them-they've responded to direct feedback.

Feedback is an integral part of the learning process, even from a very young age. How others respond to our actions gives us clues as to how we should feel about ourselves, and acts as a guide for what we'll do next.

Of course, as educators we know the importance of giving our students meaningful feedback. But how can we understand the types of feedback that are most valuable, and how can we be sure we're offering suggestions that really make a difference in our students' learning?

Feedback and the Brain

Understanding how feedback works during the learning process can help you make informed decisions about how to provide the right kind of feedback for your students.

As we know from studying neuroscience and growth mindset practices, our brains have the potential to be constantly changing. When we perceive new stimuli, they enter the brain through our sensory perceptions and make connections and pathways between our neurons. When we learn from feedback responding to the stimuli-or to the actions that resulted from it-these pathways form circuits that help determine our future behavior and decision-making.

Because feedback from another person is also a form of external stimuli, the way we choose to give feedback to young learners can have an impact on how these circuits are formed to determine their future choices.

Although many of us may not consider the feedback we give our students to be a reward or a punishment, research shows that the brain sees things differently-those neural pathways still respond to feedback as though it's an external motivator.

This means that the way you choose to give feedback is essential to how your students respond to it. Because we typically use verbal or written language to give feedback, the context, tone, and vocabulary we choose can determine how it's received, and therefore how it affects students' neural pathways and future decisions.

When giving students feedback, keep these tips in mind:

1. Praise their efforts, not their talents.

It's tempting to tell our kids just how smart and talented we think they are, but this type of praise may actually have a negative effect in the long run.

To help kids develop a growth mindset, we should praise growth-oriented behaviors-like hard work-instead of seemingly "fixed" qualities like talent or intelligence. Try using praise like "I am so proud of all the effort you put into this," or "All your hard work really paid off."

2. Mistakes and errors don't need to feel negative.

People with a growth mindset know that mistakes are part of the learning process, and that real learning can't happen without them. In fact, people learn far more from their mistakes than from their achievements-so mistakes should be something to celebrate!

Encourage your kids to shift their mindset and wear their temporary failures with pride. After all, "the only true failure can come if you quit!"

3. Be specific.

General feedback like "great job" or "almost there" is easy to give, but not always easy for the recipient to understand.

Offering feedback detailing exactly what students are doing well, or what they need to improve upon, can be infinitely more effective.

4. Explain feedback wherever possible.

Take specific feedback even further by offering detailed explanations of why you chose to make those suggestions.

For example, "Use more descriptive words" may be helpful feedback for students' writing, but it can be made even more useful with a reason why: "Adding more descriptions here will help paint a picture in your readers' mind."

5. Start with a clear goal.

If students know where they're headed from the start, they'll more easily be able to check back in during the process to make sure they're on track.

A clear, concise learning objective also serves as a reference point for you as you offer students feedback. If you're not sure where students' destination is, how can you be sure that they're going the right way?

6. Keep it timely.

Feedback is most valuable when it is given immediately following the task, or even during the process of completing it. The longer you wait between students' activities and giving your feedback on it, the less relevant your comments become.

Whenever possible, try to engage in feedback as students are working, or as soon as possible.

7. Feedback isn't just for finished work.

Many teachers only provide feedback at the end of a completed task-after a test, an essay, a project, and so on. But the most effective feedback is actually given during the creation process, because it gives students the chance to shift and pivot their work in the moment.

Try to be present to offer feedback to students throughout every step of the process, so they can put your suggestions into practice right away.

8. Give feedback one-on-one.

The best feedback is given on a personalized, individual level, rather than as addressed to an entire group. Studies show that when feedback is given to a whole group, most of the group members' natural assumption is that the feedback applies to everyone else-so they aren't likely to take it into consideration for themselves.

By offering personal, one-on-one feedback, you're showing your students that you're aware of what they're doing on an individual level, and that you're there to support them.

9. Allow time for questions and discussion.

Sometimes, the feedback we offer our students may not resonate completely with them the first time around. By offering students a chance to ask questions about feedback, we can give them an opportunity to understand it with greater depth.

Discussing their feedback-either with the teacher or a group of peers-can also be a great way to help students consider their feedback beyond the surface level.

10. Student autonomy facilitates self-reflection.

Having students reflect on their own work is a common practice in many classrooms, but this loses a lot of its value when the teacher is still the one setting all of the expectations. Having students conduct a self-reflection on a teacher-directed task isn't much more than having them guess what you will think-hardly a good use of their time!

But when students are part of the goal-setting process, self-reflection becomes much more powerful. Giving students the autonomy to guide their own learning process will better enable them to stop and reflect meaningfully as they go.

11. Feedback should come from many different sources.

While it's easy to assume that the teacher always knows best, many subjects (such as writing) can be very subjective.

The feedback that resonates most with students doesn't always come from the teacher, so encourage your students to seek our feedback from their peers, families, heroes, and any other useful source they can find.

12. Teach students how to give (and recognize) useful feedback.

Not all feedback is created equal, and knowing how to disregard useless feedback is just as important as learning to implement what's useful.

By teaching students to give quality feedback to their peers, you're also showing them what quality feedback looks like when it's coming back to them.

13. Give feedback based on concept understanding, not task completion.

It's easy to measure student success based on whether or not students did the thing you asked them to do-but is this really an accurate measure of learning? Often, the task we set for students is closely related to the concepts we want them to learn-but the two are not synonymous.

It may be that students understand the concept perfectly, but weren't able to execute the task exactly as outlined. So next time you're making a project rubric, it might be worth asking yourself whether "eye contact with the audience" during a book report is a true measure of students' understanding of the book!

14. Reach beyond "good enough."

I had a high school English teacher who always said, "Writing is never done, it's just due." There are always things to improve upon when it comes to learning, and the right feedback can encourage students to take that next step forward.

Challenge students to think of other ways they could solve a problem, further research they could conduct in a subject, or practical ways of using their new understanding.

How do you give meaningful feedback in your classroom? Let us know by connecting with us on our social channels!

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14 Ways to Give Students Meaningful Feedback - Studycat

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How do students know when they're on the right track, and when it's time to redirect? Learn how to give student feedback to guide them!

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How to Write Self Assessments (Student POV)

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How to Write Self Assessments (Student POV)

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Although I have learnt about providing students with self assessment, I don't understand how students see self assessment. This link provides light on self assessment through the students POV. As well as how to write a self assessment as a student.

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Bettering yourself - and your organization - starts with a look inward.

Especially with today's tight labor market, employers are looking for ways to optimize employee performance. Some companies have pressed pause on hiring while others have forfeited to layoffs.

No matter where your organization falls on the hiring spectrum, employers everywhere can agree. It's time to make sure your employees are tapping into their full potential. The success of your organization is depending on it.

At some point in everyone's career, it's likely you'll have to take part in a performance evaluation. Every working person will have to take part in a performance evaluation at some point in their career.

Typically, a performance evaluation, otherwise known as a performance review, begins with a series of notes from your employer or employers on how you have conducted yourself at work. They typically end with a self-assessment, where you share how much progress you believe you have made during a certain amount of time on the job.

So, in order to better ourselves and our businesses, it's critical to self-assess. On its face, self-assessments can seem like a performance management tool to keep employees on track. But it isn't just a tool to keep employees on track to meet your goals. It helps employees grow, develop, and ultimately reach their full potential.

At BetterUp, we've studied human transformation and growth. In fact, we've designed a Whole Person Assessment to help you and your employees to better understand your specific areas of strength and opportunities for growth. The result? A self-assessment helps inform a roadmap to success through coaching and personalized support.

Outside of coaching, employers will conduct performance reviews with self-assessment components at regular intervals. Some perform self-assessments as often as every three months while others will wait for longer periods of time, like six months to a year, between performance reviews.

In this post, we'll talk about the benefits of self-assessments for both employers and employees. We'll also give you some self-assessment examples to start using today. Plus, you'll learn some best practices to help conduct effective and impact self-assessments at your organization.

8 benefits of self-evaluations for managers and employees

There are a number of reasons why self-assessments are a useful tool for both managers and employees.

For managers

For managers or employers, self-assessments can be a useful tool that comes with a range of benefits. Here are four benefits of self-evaluations for managers.

Improved decision-making skills. Managers, you have to deeply know your employees' strengths and areas of opportunity. When you're managing a team, it's critical to know when (and where) certain employees need to jump into a priority.

Especially in a fast-changing world of work, the decisions that managers are making are increasing. But with help from a self-assessment by your employees, you have a window into where your employees can flex their skills.

For example, let's say a new data analysis project pops up. You need someone on your team to step up and lead the project. You also need another person to help crunch the numbers - and put together a narrative that the data tells.

Because of your employees' self-assessments, you can quickly identify and make decisions on who should lead what.

Better goal-setting. Self-assessments also help managers get a better understanding of what an employee's goals are at work. Having a good grasp on what employees want from their work and what they feel are their strengths and weaknesses can help managers lead better.

A self-assessment is a handy tool for managers to use in order to highlight workers' achievements, set future goals, check in on employee weaknesses, and assess how they can help employees improve those skills.

For employees

Just as managers benefit from self-assessments, so do employees. We've outlined four ways self-assessments help benefit the employee.

Increased self-awareness. A self-assessment can act as a mirror or reflection point. At BetterUp, we use a Whole Person Model to help our Members accurately gain self-awareness and self-reflect.

According to our Whole Person Model, we see a 172% increase in self-awareness for those who start out low as a result of coaching. But what does coaching have to do with self-assessments? It can help bring awareness to an employee's strengths - and areas of opportunity.

Better learning and development goals. A self-assessment can help pinpoint different target growth areas. Designed to help prompt your employees to examine their skills, a self-assessment can be the tool you need to help identify a learning goal.

Improved self-confidence. A self-assessment, though it can sound intimidating, isn't just for identifying what's not working. For many employees, it's also a reassurance of what's working well, especially when your manager agrees.

A self-assessment can help your employees realize strengths they might not have identified before. It can also show growth areas where they might've struggled before.

At BetterUp, we measure human transformation with our Whole Person Assessment. Throughout your coaching journey, you'll reach reflection points. Over time, our Members see first-hand the skills they've improved.

For example, when I first took my Whole Person Assessment, I scored lowest in self-compassion. My coach worked with me to identify ways I could build my self-compassion through habits and thoughts. By the time I took my next self-assessment, my self-compassion had rocketed. And because I had data points to see where I started, I could see how much I had grown.

Opens up opportunities for further professional development. To go hand-in-hand with learning and development, self-assessments can help determine where employees should invest in professional development.

For example, let's say your employee takes a self-assessment and realizes they're falling short on project management skills. Because of the assessment, you can offer project management workshops to help their professional development.

38 self-assessment examples for you to use

Here are 38 examples of questions that managers can ask their employees during a self-assessment.

Questions on achievements

What areas do you think you could improve in?

What could you have done better at work over the past year?

What would you say your strengths are?

How do you think you have contributed the most to the company?

What has been your favorite project in the last year?

Do you think you did a good job fulfilling your responsibilities over the last year?

Questions on goals

What goals did you set for yourself this year? Month? Quarter?

How many of those goals did you achieve?

Were you happy with the results of meeting those goals you set for yourself?

What are your future goals for next year? Quarter? Month? What can I do to help you better meet those goals?

Questions on advancement and professional growth

Have you taken part in any professional development programs the company offers?

Are there any leadership positions you would like to have in the future?

Is there any specific training that you feel you could use to help be more prepared to pursue a leadership role?

Are there any skills that you could develop outside of work that would help with your work performance?

Do you feel that there are any particular skills or talents of yours that you are not using?

Questions on creativity

Do you feel that you think "outside the box" when it comes to finding solutions to work-related problems?

What are some examples of when you thought "outside of the box" in order to solve a work problem? What could your manager do to make it easier for you to use creative problem-solving skills ?

Do you feel that your position allows you to use your creative problem-solving skills to the fullest?

Questions on communication skills

Do you think that you communicate effectively with your manager and colleagues?

What do you think makes a good communicator?

How do you start difficult conversations with co-workers or managers?

How often do you ask for help on an assignment? Or ask questions to help clarify something about a project?

Questions on time management

Do you think that you use your time wisely while at work?

When was a time when you thought you managed your time well?

How could you improve your time management skills in the future?

Can you describe an example of when you could have used your time better?

Questions on values and behaviors

Do you think that you have worked in a way that aligns with our core values?

What could you do to improve how you embody some of the company's core values?

What do you value most about your work?

When do you feel the most valued by the company?

What are the qualities you have that make a valuable employee?

List five things you do that positively impact your productivity.

Questions on weaknesses

Can you identify any weaknesses that you might have that could be hampering your productivity?

Do you feel comfortable asking for help if you run into a problem with work?

How could you work toward improving your work-related opportunities?

Is there anything that leadership could do in order to help you address these opportunities?

While coming up with questions for a performance review can be tough for managers. Crafting responses to a self-assessment that portrays an employee in their best light is even tougher.

Looking at a few examples of self-assessment questions and responses can be helpful when preparing for your own review. If you are particularly nervous about your self-assessment, practice by writing out some responses to the listed example questions. Use the example response as a jumping-off point for your own practice responses.

Here are some example responses to the self-evaluation questions listed above.

Responses on achievements

"I try to lead by example and feel that I put in my best effort every day. I am always the first person to arrive at work and always the last to leave."

"I have extremely high standards for my work and have gone above and beyond my job description. I routinely set goals for myself and work late nights and over the weekend to complete assignments."

"Earlier this year, I decided I wanted to improve my public speaking skills and volunteered to give a company-wide presentation on a recently completed project. I'm proud of myself for taking that fear head-on, and the presentation was well received."

Responses on goals

"I would like to be able to keep working on my leadership skills. In order to do this, I plan to double down on my commitment to keep pitching project ideas at meetings and taking the lead on group work. I am proud to say that I have grown as a leader over the past year and would love to continue to do so."

"One of the goals I set for myself this year was to become more organized. I have struggled a bit to learn how to better manage my time or delegate tasks but I am actively trying to learn from my mistakes."

Responses on advancement and growth

"When I applied for my current position, I did so with the long-term goal of eventually obtaining a managerial role. I can see myself overseeing a team at the company given my interests, ability to delegate tasks, organization, and expert time management skills. I also really enjoy pushing my colleagues to do their best and explore new ways of tackling a project."

" Now that I have worked at the company for a year, I have learned enough that I feel confident taking the creative lead on a project in the near future."

Responses about creativity

"Since starting with the company, I have often used creative problem-solving skills on assignments or used lateral thinking to find solutions to work-related problems."

"I have been commended several times over the past quarter for my original ideas during pitch sessions, ability to think outside of the box, and come up with creative solutions to problems."

"During my team's weekly meeting, I am typically the first person to jump in with an idea for our next project."

"I often try to help my colleagues figure out solutions to problems when they are stuck."

Responses about communication skills

"I routinely ask questions to clarify expectations for assignments."

"I am often the first one to speak up with a question or concern in a meeting."

"I always speak respectfully when having hard conversations with managers and co-workers."

"I know how to respectfully receive feedback on my performance from managers and co-workers."

"I frequently talk to fellow team members about things that are going well or not so well on a project."

"If I can not meet a deadline, I always give notice to my manager as early as possible with an explanation as to why I am behind."

Responses about time management skills

"In the past year, I have made all of my deadlines and frequently submit my work ahead of time."

"My ability to be organized has saved co-workers hours of time on collaborations."

"My co-workers will sometimes come to me for advice on how to improve their time management skills. I am always happy to give recommendations to co-workers in the hopes of making our company run more efficiently."

Responses about values and behaviors

"I believe that the best relationships between employees and employers are built on transparency."

" I value kindness in the workplace and make sure to be as welcoming and helpful to everyone I interact with."

"I believe that every obstacle can be overcome with open and respectful communication."

"I value my co-workers and strive to be as thoughtful about their well-being as I am my own."

"I believe that a positive attitude is the best tool in the workplace and always look at setbacks as opportunities."

Responses on weaknesses

"I am a high achiever and often struggle with telling a manager no to an extra work assignment even if I have a lot on my plate already. Unfortunately, this can impact my productivity as completing multiple tasks in a timely fashion can be a tough balancing act.

As a result, I will sometimes miss a deadline or ask for a deadline to be changed. I have been learning how to let my manager know if I have too many tasks to take on a new assignment. I'm happy to say I have made some progress and will continue to work on improving."

"I sometimes find it hard to ask for help completing a task when doing so could help me finish an assignment more efficiently.

Because of this, I can inadvertently waste time on an assignment that could have been completed quickly with the help of a manager or co-worker. I am trying to be better at anticipating when I will need help for a project and asking for it early."

Best practices when writing your self-assessment

1. Be honest

When writing a review of your work performance, be honest with yourself. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and a self-assessment is meant to highlight those on-the-job strengths.

They also allow employees to come up with solutions on how to improve in their weaker areas. Make sure to be honest in mentioning times that you fell short at work from something small like turning up a few minutes late to a meeting to something more consequential like missing an important deadline.

2. Be confident

You should be proud of the work you do and there is nothing wrong with expressing that pride in a self-assessment.

While being honest about work mistakes is crucial in a self-assessment, you should also mention the times that you went the extra mile or really shined.

3. Be committed to improving

A self-assessment is all about figuring out what you need to do to become better at your work, and there is always room for self-improvement. Make sure to express in your self-assessment how you want to keep growing.

Expressing an interest in discovering new ways to improve on good work habits and strengths, as well as shortcomings, will make you appear to be an employee that will grow with the company.

4. Be professional

You should never make things personal in a self-assessment. That means no insulting your manager or boss for poor leadership skills or blaming a colleague for a less than stellar result on a collaborative project.

It also means taking responsibility for your own shortcomings in the workplace. Being professional also means taking the performance review and the self-assessment seriously. Make sure to take the time to write a worthwhile review that isn't rushed or forced and is instead filled with insights and solutions.

5. Take your time

A self-assessment that is rushed won't help anyone. Make time for self-reflection beforehand, and take your time when sitting down to write your self-assessment and put some thought into it.

This is one of the few chances that you will have in the workplace to advocate for yourself and remind your employer why you are great at your job. This is also a great opportunity to let management know that you are struggling with something and to see if there are any professional development programs that your company offers to help you address these weaknesses.

6. Be specific

During your self-assessment, use specific examples as much as possible. For example, if you are taking the time to write about how you consistently do the bulk of the work needed to complete group projects, make sure to list three or four examples.

Don't be afraid to say that you were the one that stayed up all night to make sure that a deadline was met. Or that you were the one that pushed your colleagues to make the project better.

Something that can help you do this more easily is to track your accomplishments throughout the year. Keep a journal or a small notebook at your desk or on your person where you can jot down notes about the things you think you have done well every day or every week.

Having a weekly or monthly list of your accomplishments will make it much easier to remind a manager or employer how valuable you are to the company.

7. Use numbers

Data can help convince an employer that your work has been beneficial to the company. When writing a self-assessment, back up claims about your achievements with numbers.

If you write in your self-assessment that you are great at figuring out ways to shorten the amount of time your team spends on projects, make sure to reference how much time you have been able to cut. Including concrete numbers in your self-assessment will allow your manager or employer to develop a metric to measure your achievements.

How to ready an employee self-assessment

Preparing ahead of time for giving or writing a self-assessment is central to having a constructive performance review. Managers should know what goals they would like employees to have completed and review themselves with some areas of weakness that employees can improve before talking about a self-assessment.

If you are having trouble figuring out how to craft a self-assessment to give to employees there are a number of free self-evaluation templates online, like this one.

By using a template, you can streamline the self-assessment process and make less work for yourself in the future if you need to modify any questions on the evaluation. When sitting down to have a person-to-person discussion about employee performance, remember to give constructive feedback.

Tap into the potential of your workforce

As a result, it's important to make sure you're maximizing the potential of your workforce. Self-assessments are the starting point to figuring out what potential lies within your employees (and your organization).

Whether you're looking at your own performance or your employees' performance, BetterUp can help. An employee self-evaluation can be the ticket to building better teamwork, job performance, and work ethic.

Get started with virtual coaching to help provide personalized support for your employees. The result? A mentally fit workforce that's better prepared for what the future holds.

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How to Write a Self-Assessment (With Examples)

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Bettering yourself - and your organization - starts with a look inward. Especially with today's tight labor market, employers are looking for ways to optimize employee performance. Some companies have pressed pause on hiring while others have forfeited to layoffs. No matter where your organization falls on the hiring spectrum, employers everywhere can agree.

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This link includes 250 possible assessments for my students. If I am ever struggling in finding assessments for my students, I can look at this link. However, this website uses the old curriculum.

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Performance Assessments - Alberta Assessment Consortium

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AAC Performance Assessments: Engage students in their learning Develop critical thinking skills Encourage innovation and problem solving Provide quality assessment evidence Are based on Alberta curriculum Some Performance Assessments are for Members Only, while others are open to everyone. Create Your Own Performance Tasks Check out "Developing a Performance Assessment Task" to guide you through ...

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Here, I have linked a website document that shares different possible verbs for each tier in the Bloom's levels. This is important for assessment because I need to include appropriate verbs on my rubrics.

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An idea for a possible summative assessment for my future classroom is a rich math task. We did the rich math task in my first semester of third year education. Rich math tasks allow for all students to achieve their learning ability. This link will take me to different rich math task ideas.

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Every student deserves to have the opportunity to problem-solve and engage in genuine mathematical thinking. Rich tasks are designed to make these rich learning experiences possible. We've written these tasks to launch quickly, engage students, and promote the habits of mind mathematicians need: perseverance & pattern-seeking, courage & curiosity, organization & communication.

This free video PD series will help you get the most out of the tasks below.

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Every student deserves to have the opportunity to problem-solve and engage in genuine mathematical thinking. Rich tasks are designed to make these rich learning experiences possible. We've written these tasks to launch quickly, engage students, and promote the habits of mind mathematicians need: perseverance & pattern-seeking, courage & curiosity, organization & communication.

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In this website, I can see 250+ materials and ideas for performance assessments. I can look at this website when I need ideas for possible performance assessments in my classroom. However, the resources in this website are based on the old curriculum.

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Performance Assessments - Alberta Assessment Consortium

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AAC Performance Assessments: Engage students in their learning Develop critical thinking skills Encourage innovation and problem solving Provide quality assessment evidence Are based on Alberta curriculum Some Performance Assessments are for Members Only, while others are open to everyone. Create Your Own Performance Tasks Check out "Developing a Performance Assessment Task" to guide you through ...

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This link will provide me with ideas and things to implement into my rubrics for future assignments. Note, this website uses the old Alberta curriculum.

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Rubric Materials - Alberta Assessment Consortium

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Building Better Rubrics! Resource Links to Support Building Better Rubrics Rubric Templates Rubric Template (download Word document) Rubric Template (enlarged) (download Word document) Workshop Tools Rubriques Rubriques - Tools Rubriques - Templates Gabarit grilles d'évaluation (download Word document) Gabarit grilles d'évaluation (version agrandie) (download Word document)

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In this link, teachers can see how to ensure your assessment is accurate and fair for students. The article focuses on ensuring academic integrity within assessments involves bolstering student learning alongside measures that mitigate shortcuts.

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How to ensure fair and accurate end-to-end assessment

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A closer look at upholding academic integrity within assessments and bolster student learning outcomes.

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This is an article from our education assessment class. It outlines why fair assessment is important, how to use it, how to teach students fair assessment, and how it benefits both students and teachers.

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In this article, teachers can see different ways to set up their classroom. In my practicum I have had to change seating arrangements up twice. However, I struggled how to change up the seating arrangement. This link will help me if I need a quick way to change up the seating in my classroom.

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Every lesson is different. There are many teaching methods for your lesson topics, so why not change your classroom interior based on your lesson? Sometimes, students have to work in groups, sometimes you give a presentation, sometimes you do some corner work. Every strategy needs an effective classroom arrangement.

In this post, I'll show you 19 possible classroom seating arrangements. I'll also mention the teaching methods that go with the arranged bench seating and at the end of this post, I added an interactive whiteboard with which you can create your own classroom seating chart.

19 types of seating arrangements for classrooms

1. Pairs

Let's start with one of the most used bench seating arrangements: Pairs. Pair up students and let them work individual or together. It's more fun with two but still gives you a nice overview. In this way, students can get their heads together when needed. If they have to work individually, let's say they have a test, you can place a binding folder between the students. Here, you can also easily divide your classroom into three columns of pairs. Ask, for example, the first column to answer question A, the second column to answer question B and the last column to answer question C. Go over the answers when they've finished. That way, you can speed up the classical work.

2. Grid

This seating arrangement is especially handy when testing your students or when you want them to work individually. They can't talk to each other or let their eyes wander on someone else's paper. I wouldn't recommend this seating arrangement in your classroom all the time. Students could get demotivated as they have no-one to "whisper" to.

3. Presentation

Get your students seated next to each other on one line. Repeat this a few times if you have enough classroom space. The purpose is to let students listen to the one in front of the classroom. This can be the teacher, or a student giving a presentation or demonstration. Seating your students this way is a good idea when you want them to focus on the front of the classroom. All students should be able to see something and it's easier for the one in the front to divide its attention and eye contact.

4. Groups of Four

Use small groups of four when you want your students to put their heads together. You can let them work on an assignment. You can also let them think about a question individually and ask them to deliberate with the other students in the group. Of course, just individual work is also possible. This seating arrangement just makes it a bit more social. When working with "groups of four" students get to sit with others all the time. They get to know each other better and make friends. This seating arrangement is a good idea to start the year.

5. Corner Work

When you're working on a big project or teaching a comprehensive topic with different aspects or themes, this seating arrangement will do just fine. Assign different tasks to each corner. For example, a (digital) crossword riddle, a quiz, a video with questions, a whiteboard exercise, ... All the assignments complete each other. Let your students shuffle so they've been to every corner and did every assignment. You can also use it to split up students with the same learning level. One corner where students get more instructions, the other has expansion exercises, one corner has noise-canceling headphones so students can concentrate, etc.

6. U-shape

The U-shape or the horseshoe. This classroom arrangement encourages discussion and makes it easy for the teacher to observe students and give one-on-one help. Don't use this desk arrangement for group work. This will be almost impossible.

7. Double U-shape

When you have more students or a smaller classroom, you can choose for the double U-shape arrangement. This allows you to put more students next to each other. It's very cozy but has some disadvantages as well. For example, it's harder for the teacher to go around in the classroom. One-on-one support is more or less off the table here. Students in the back might feel a bit left out as well. It's best to use this arrangement when giving a presentation or when teaching in front of the classroom.

8. U-shape Large Classroom

You can see where I'm going here. Let's say you have a large classroom and a lot of students, then you can definitely use this student desk arrangement. In contrast to the double u-shape arrangement, this u-shape for in a large classroom doesn't really cast students out. There's no separate "U" in the front, which makes it more open to the students in the back.

9. Conference Small Classroom

Are you teaching a small group of students? In that case, the conference classroom arrangement is a possibility. The "conference classroom" gives your students an "equal voice" and a snapshot of a business meeting room. Use the conference seating arrangement when making classroom rules, planning an event, for an intervention, a class discussion, etc. You can also practice speech (foreign language) by letting the students facing each other talk to each other. Let them switch places and move on to the next student in line and talk about another topic.

10. Conference Large Classroom

Don't worry though, there's a conference classroom layout for many students and a large classroom as well. Use this just like mentioned above. The only thing that's not possible is letting students face each other and talk directly to them. Don't use it for group work either.

11. Herringbone

This interesting student desk arrangement serves two purposes. It is rows of two, three or four, but slightly turned so they face the center of the classroom. This way, students give full attention to the teacher or students at the front of the classroom, and they can join in on a classroom discussion easily. You can also let your students work together with the ones on their row.

12. Rows

This is used most of the time in higher education when students have to listen to the teacher in the front. Here, the teacher can't give any one-on-one feedback as it's hard to reach students in the middle. It's a seating arrangement to get as many students in one classroom.

13. Computer Combination

Any of the other classroom seating arrangements work with portable devices like laptops, chromebooks or tablets. When you're in a classroom with student desks and computers, you can use this classroom layout. It gives you an overview of your students' computers.

14. Butterfly

This one is probably new to you. Let your students work individually, yet they sit together. This middle of the butterfly serves as a place where students go for extra instructions or a new assignment. Everything will be spread out on those desks in the middle. The teacher will be available to give more guidance when needed as well.

15. Eye

Use eye-formation when you're setting up a debate or discussion. Select a group of students that will debate in the middle of the eye. The rest will be the audience.

16. Circle

The circle is a classic seating formation in which you encourage your students to join a classroom talk or discussion. It's more or less the same as the conference classroom seating.

17. Large Groups

Split your classroom into two large groups. Let the groups work on bigger projects like organizing an event, putting together a play, setting up their own "company", keep a political meeting with different representatives,etc. Keep in mind that it might get loud in your classroom.

18. Horseshoes

Use this classroom desk arrangement to encourage discussion in smaller groups. Introduce some bold statements or "problems" about your teaching topic and let your students discuss them in their groups (in a foreign language you're teaching languages). Encourage your students to come to a consensus or a solution to the problem.

19. Banquet

Use this classroom seating layout for two things:

Let students talk to the one facing them (discussion, practice a foreign language, get to know each other, etc.).

Divide your classroom into two groups. Let them work together on bigger projects like in number 17. Let them organize an event, put together a play, set up their own "company", etc.

Create your own classroom seating arrangement

I guess these are more or less all the possible classroom seating arrangements. Of course, you can make combinations of different classroom layouts and adapt them to your own classroom and available space. Use this basic lesson plan template with a whiteboard below. Use the stickers I created to set up your own classroom layout for your teaching purpose. It's not a classroom seating arrangement app, but it comes close. It gives you much more freedom as you can draw your own classroom setup. Check out this tool (the worksheet widget) on BookWidgets!

This worksheet is created with BookWidgets - Click to open

Wrap up

Every classroom is different. The most important thing is that students feel confident and trust the classroom environment. Make sure to move around your student desks from time to time so you have the perfect classroom seating arrangement for your lesson.

Share this post with other teachers to inspire them! A little variety in class is always nice.

Let us know on Twitter what your favorite type of seating arrangement is! If you have any other setup ideas or a fun combination in your classroom, be sure to share them in our Facebook Group.

Find me on LikedIn! My name is Lucie.

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19 Classroom seating arrangements fit for your teaching

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Every lesson is different. There are many teaching methods for your lesson topics, so why not change your classroom interior based on your lesson? Sometimes, students have to work in groups, sometimes you give a presentation, sometimes you do some corner work. Every strategy needs an effective classroom arrangement.

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In this article linked, teachers can see the importance of formative assessment. It outlines many different topics and ideas regarding formative assessment.

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This link will take me to the website Quizzes. It is similar to Kahoot. When students are playing, I can take notes on who is winning and who is answering what as they are playing. It is a fun way to gather information and student for an upcoming test.

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Quizizz - The world's most engaging learning platform

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Find and create gamified quizzes, lessons, presentations, and flashcards for students, employees, and everyone else. Get started for free!

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In our Physical Education class with Jason McLestor, he provided us with this document. This link will provide me with assessment ideas for PE class.

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This link will take me to a website that will provide me with a ton of free resources. Most of these include summative assessments. However, it also includes formative assessment and different rubric types.

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Note: The School of the Future is part of a network of New York schools that develops and uses its own assessment techniques, referred to as DYOs. The school also uses Tasks on Demand, or unannounced assessments that do not provide supports for the students, in order to measure their learning at regular intervals.
Do Your Own (DYO) Assessment Examples, Rubrics, Data, and Data Analysis
Examples of criteria used in authentic assessment
Skills Spirals and Tracking Sheets
Ideas for moving curriculum into a circular pattern and tracking performance to expose students to a wide variety of topics over and over again as the material gets more challenging
SOF's Instuctional Tools for Teachers
Lesson planning guides, date-driven decision making tools, discussion protocols, and teacher observation forms
Tools for Developing a High School Humanities Project -- Persepolis
Rubrics, organizers, and lessons plans for a high school graphic novel project
Schedules and Other Resources

Websites and Readings

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Tweet your answer to @edutopia or post your comment below.

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Free Resources and Tools for "Authentic" Assessment | Edutopia

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Note: The School of the Future is part of a network of New York schools that develops and uses its own assessment techniques, referred to as DYOs. The school also uses Tasks on Demand, or unannounced assessments that do not provide supports for the students, in order to measure their learning at regular intervals.

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In this link there are a bunch of student led conference ideas and tools for my teachers. Some of these include agenda templates and reflection sheets for both parents and students.

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Student-Led Conferences: Resources for Educators

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Whether you already do student-led conferences or are interested in making a shift, this list includes a variety of go-to examples, guides, tips, and forms to help launch or improve these meetings.