In summation, our readings for this week dealt largely with the idea of "formative assessment"--essentially, teaching students to evaluate their learning and take steps to square it with the goals of the course over a period of study. In contrast to summative learning--the traditional letter or percentage grade that students get at the end of the year-- formative assessment seeks to get learners interested in their own progress. By helping them to identify the metacognitive processes at play in their learning experiences, Sadler, in his 1989 essay "Formative Assessment and the Design of Instructional Systems" thinks students can better "bridge the gap", as he says, between merely mediocre or formulaic work and well-crafted, creative products. For the most part, he addresses these issues in terms of student compositions and essays, where the line between what makes a good and a bad piece of writing becomes somewhat "fuzzy". Teachers should, he advises, start out with a solid framework: a set of expectations described through examples and standards. The criteria that teachers then use when grading these assignments are a significant secondary topic for Sadler, and he goes into great detail describing the thought processes and strategies behind making these "multicriterion judgments". The most important topic, however, is what happens after--how instructors communicate areas for improvement to their students and help them bring their work up to snuff. Since the article is almost entirely theory and philosophy, Sadler doesn't offer many practical tactics to achieve this, instead saying, "providing guided but direct and authentic evaluative experience for students enables them to develop their evaluative knowledge". He concludes by implying that in order to close the gap, students simply need to gain experience--to fail often enough, and in different enough ways, that they can identify all these different detractors in their work during future endeavors.
The How People Learn chapter offers much more concrete advise. In "The Design of Learning Environments", the authors discuss the importance of integrating learner-, knowledge- and assessment-driven learning. In addition to taking into account the developmental and personal abilities of individual students, they present several examples of cultural misunderstandings and effective teachers using the cultural and community backgrounds of their students in order to make learning connections. They also address formative assessment more loosely, as feedback, and stress the importance of integration in all aspects of learning.
I can see where formative assessment would be of great use in a library instructional setting. In one-shot workshops and information literacy tutorials, most of the librarian's students won't be sticking around for more than a few sessions. Giving them letter grades at the end of these classes would be completely ineffective, whereas allowing them to build on and learn from their mistakes could result in a higher rate of comprehension. Additionally, most of the library patrons likely to show up to such a session would be doing so voluntarily--the often-necessary motivator of grades would have no bearing.
In this scenario, the How People Learn reading is, at least on the face of it, much more useful to library instructors than Sadler's. After all, the first refers almost exclusively to assessment of written works (which, while perhaps found in some library environments, would not be the main focus of instructional programming) while the second offers concrete, practical advise on how to relate to students of different culture and integrate the things they learn into their community life. However, Sadler's theories better describe the inner life of the evaluator, and how her implicit judgments seem to migrate, as if by osmosis, to her students. Taking into account his exhortations to provide examples, criteria, and specific task definitions, as well as the ongoing teaching tactics provided by How People Learn, I feel I have a much better idea now of how to teach my hypothetical future library patrons with their learning aforethought.
Building on your last paragraph ... absolutely. If we, as librarians, take understanding seriously and adopt it as part of our job, then whenever we're planning a workshop or a database demo, we can build in checks for understanding. As we circulate through a computer lab, we can be looking for evidence of confusion or understanding. On some level, this is just another form of the paradigm shift from "I'm teaching you" to, "What are you learning and how can I help you maximize that?"
ReplyDeleteI think you nailed it with your last sentence. The first step is to think of the learner's (be they patrons, students, new employees, etc.)learning first.
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