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In Attention, Meaning & Mastery I wrote that all teachers need to answer four questions every lesson:
- How do all know all students are paying attention?
- How do I know all students have made sense of what has been taught?
- How do I know all students are mastering the skills I want them to learn?
- How can I do all this in a way which is inclusive and results in all students experiencing success?
This post explores the second question: how can we be sure our students have understood what we have taught?
Teaching ≠ Learning
A lot of what we teach as part of an academic curriculum will be both novel and confusing for our students. One of the hallmarks of the concepts which make up subject disciplines is that they run counter to our intuitive beliefs about how the world works. As such, we can be certain that some students will struggle to understand some of what we teach at least some of the time.
We don’t need to get into theories of meaning-making here, but it’s worth stating that we ‘make sense’ of new information by relating it to things with which we are already familiar. On encountering the same information, a class of students will all construct a unique and personal understanding. Education professor, Graham Nuthall discovered through meticulous research (including audio recordings, interviews, and observations) that each student understands and learns wildly different parts of the content presented in a lesson.
“The remarkable thing about learning in classrooms is that each student learns something different. Students only learn about 40–50 percent of what teachers teach, and each student learns a different 40–50 percent.”
— Graham Nuthall, The Hidden Lives of Learners (2007), p. 24
Learning is always partial, personal and uneven. Hence the need for teachers to find out what students understand. Some of these understandings will be flawed and many will be superficial but all will be dynamic; our understanding is based on shifting sands which force us into a constant – and exhausting – reappraisal of meaning. Small wonder students lose focus and get frustrated.
Educational psychologist, David Ausubel offers this famous advice:
The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach accordingly.
Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View, 1968, p. vi
Ausubel makes lots of practical suggestions on how to enact this advice from using ‘advanced organisers’ (concrete examples & analogies), assessing prior knowledge, and coherent curriculum sequencing. He also makes clear that teachers must ‘promote active engagement’ (by which he means encouraging students to make connections, ask questions and summarise information presented) and that learning should be made ‘meaningful’. He says,
In meaningful learning … the learner consciously seeks to link new ideas with those already possessed, anchoring them in a substantive and non-arbitrary fashion.
Educational Psychology p. 24
While a huge part of making learning meaningful is concerned with the structure of the curriculum and the skill with which teachers present ideas, it also depends on constantly checking, rather than assuming, that the sense students have made is in line with the sense we wish for them to make.
Attentive readers will notice that many of the techniques I suggest for checking understanding are superficially similar to those discussed in the post on how to check attention. The key is for teachers to be able to think about what they want to achieve and then deploy strategies to that purpose.
Ask open questions
When checking for attentions we need to ask closed questions but these don’t work will for assessing understanding. What’s required are questions that push students into summarising and rephrasing new ideas using their own words. This is hard for them to do. Anything that ask students to think hard about subject content is likely to be both beneficial and irksome.
Here are some examples of open questions I might ask:
- OK, so we know many people believed in the Divine Right of Kings. What does that mean?
- Rahoul says that Scrooge is scared of being good. Give me an example of where this might be true.
- When Jekyll says that taking the drug was similar to the experience of “the captives of Philippi” what does he mean?
- Why does Priestley use dramatic irony at the start of An Inspector Calls?
Pause & repeat
Each of these might be tough for students to answer. Just throwing these out and expecting thoughtful responses is at best naive. At worst it will result in us systematically discriminating against those students who take longer to process ideas. There’s a sizeable body of evidence that indicates teachers leave very little space between asking a question and expecting an answer. This slips, all too easily, into the “Anyone? Anyone?” problem:
The teacher, played wonderfully by Ben Stein, is doing a lot of things right. There are lots of good check-for-attention closed questions but, of course, he doesn’t actually use them to check for attention. Do any of these students understand anything about voodoo economics? Probably not. Certainly we’ll never know as he never pauses to make students answer.
We know that on average, teachers wait for less than a second after asking a question but, when we increase ‘wait time’ to 3-5 seconds we’re likely to get much better outcomes.
“When the average wait time was increased to at least three seconds, the length and correctness of student responses increased, the number of student questions increased, and failure to respond decreased.”
But waiting for five seconds can feel like a mini eternity. What I tend to do is repeat the question two or three times. Not only does this build in a few extra seconds of wait time, it also helps fix the terms of the question in students’ minds. Here’s an example:
Why did Shakespeare write Macbeth? We know some people believed in the Divine Right of Kings and we’ve also looked at the Great Chain of Being, the idea that society is ordered hierarchically. I want you to use these two ideas to help you answer the question. … Why did Shakespeare write Macbeth? … Why might Shakespeare have written a play with the plot of Macbeth? … Ezekiel?
In addition, I’d almost certainly write this kind of question on the board to further support students’ ability to answer it.
MWBs
In the example above I would run a huge risk that Ezekiel shrugs his shoulders and admits defeat. As a consequence, I’ve learned almost never to cold call on check-for-understanding questions. Instead, I’ll ask students to jot an answer onto their mini whiteboard. Even then, without significant warming up I’d predict that a significant number of students will have nothing useful to say so I’ll have built up to this question slowly both in order to make it clear that I value the answers students might give, and to give them every opportunity to make sense of what I’m teaching.
Using MWBs like this is an opportunity for students to externalise their thought processes and get some clarity about what it is they think. It also allows them to experiment as they tentatively explore an idea and rub out anything they decide is wrong.
Circulate & Messy markbook
Although I don’t need to go through the ‘1,2,3 show me’ routine, I do want to see what students are writing on their boards. If I’ve asked a question which I want to use to gauge students’ understanding and it’s clear some of them don’t get it, I want to address any misunderstandings as quickly as possible. If a student isn’t writing anything I can prompt them. All the while, I’d be jotting anything I wanted to remember on my markbook. She has a great answer. He’s made an interesting mistake etc.
If it’s clear many or most students are struggling, that’s my responsibility. I’ve obviously not explained something clearly enough or perhaps I’ve missed out something crucial. It’s best to find this out as quickly as possible and not allow students to continue embedding errors. For instance, the last time I asked the Macbeth question above I noticed most of the students starting writing something down about Shakespeare wanting to flatter James I. This may or may not be true (we have no real way of knowing) but it was irrelevant to the meaning I wanted them to make.
At this point I have choice. I can either stop everyone and reteach what I need them to understand, or I can get students to explain it to each other and see if that solves the problem.
Turn and talk
I see a lot of teachers getting students to ‘turn and talk’ without really thinking about why. This leads to wasted opportunities and disjointed lessons. I mostly use turn and talk to check understanding and I do it in one of two ways. Either, I use it because it’s become clear that some students don’t understand what I’ve been trying to teach and getting them to talk to each can sometimes move this forward without me having to tell them. Sometimes it’s important to ‘just tell them’ but sometimes it’s unhelpful. If I direct everyone’s attention back to me, I’m still no clearer on their understanding but if I allow them to talk, I have an opportunity to listen in to get a better sense of what they do understand.
The second way I use turn and talk is after students have written an answer on their MWBs and before I call on individuals to share ideas with the class. Doing this has two prnciple benefits. Firstly it allows all students to explain themselves and secondly it provides an invaluable opporunity to induce the production effect. This is the finding that saying something aloud makes it more memorable (MacLeod et al. 2010) and that giving all students occasions to answer questions increases how much they are likely to learn (Roediger & Karpicke 2006).
The other ingredient to good turn and talk is to prevent one student from dominating the discussion. I tend to tell students I’m going to ask them to feedback what they heard not what they just said. I also clearly signal when the first student should stop talking and start listening. As a final tweak, I might sometimes give two slightly different but connected questions such as, ‘Why does Priestley use dramatic irony?’ and ‘How does Priestley use dramatic irony?’ and get each member of a talk partnership to answer the different prompts and then listen to each other’s answer.
Cold call
Unlike when I’m checking attention, the only time I cold call students to check understanding is after a turn and talk when I’m confident they are properly warmed up, ready to answer and keen to show off the results of their thinking. I’m not really interested in sampling to find out whether all students understand the question because, if I’ve been circulating throughout the process, I should already know this. Also, I will already have a good sense of who I want to contribute as I’ll have recorded this on my markbook. My main reason is so that students can hear a range of answers and given them an opportunity to refine or change their own answer.
My other reason for cold calling after turn and talk is to scaffold academic language but more on this in the post on consolidation.
Hinge-point questions
As discussed here, HPQs are a great way to design lessons around whether or not students have grasped essential points. A HPQ is a diagnostic tool deployed at a point in a lesson – the hinge – where teachers need to know whether students are ready to move on require further instruction. Students’ responses should provide teachers with information about what actions they should take next. A well-designed HPQ should reveal potential misconceptions which can then be addressed.
Students need to be able to answer the hinge question quickly – ideally in less than two minutes – and teachers should be able to read and interpret answers in about 30 seconds. For this to be possible, students will need to complete answers on MWBs (so teachers can scan answers at speed) and questions must be asked in a multiple-choice format (so students don’t waste time writing down anything other than a, b, c or d.)
Writing effective multiple-choice questions (MCQs) takes practice. The aim should be to eliminate guessing: students who know the answer should get it right; students who don’t know the answer should be distracted by one of the distractors. An MCQ should have an unambiguously correct answer and at least two distractors. Consider this example:
What is a volta?
- Where the tone of a poem becomes negative
- The halfway point of a poem
- A change in mood or thought or both
One of the keys of writing distractors is that they should be plausible and expose potential errors in students’ understanding. Poorly written MCQs often contain implausible, or even absurd, potential answers which make it easier for students to guess the correct answer. We’re used to seeing these kinds of MCQs on TV phone-in quizzes:
Who wrote Romeo and Juliet?
- William Shakespeare
- Mickey Mouse
- Ant and Dec
Ideally, distractors should contain true information which does not accurately answer the question. They should also be tempting. Students should have to think through why they’re wrong. If all distractors are not equally plausible, questions can end up being simply true or false, which students then have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing correctly.
With the example given above, ‘What is a volta?’ c) is unambiguously correct. The other two answers are plausible and based on common misconceptions. Students often come to think that a volta must be negative (it may be sometimes but by no means always) or that it will come at the halfway point (again, it might, especially in a Petrarchan sonnet, but it doesn’t have to). If students are tempted by either of these options, the teacher will know they have to either review curriculum materials to make sure the definition is more clearly stated or finesse their teaching to ensure the definition doesn’t go missing.
As you can see, these take some preparation (although GenAI can help if carefully prompted) but are an invaluable method for checking understanding.
Visualisers (we do)
Finally, back to the visualiser. Too often, the ‘we do’ phase of constructing responses tends to be the teacher simply narrating the reasons for choices in their pre-prepared response. This might result in students having a better understanding of the topic but how would we know? Instead, if we’re using a visualiser to check understanding it has to used make students think about the content and elicit responses that demonstrate that thinking.
So, for instance, if I wanted to co-construct a written response I’d share sentence stems and then ask students to make selections about what to put next on their MWBs, follow with some paired talk and then sample responses to determine which to add under the visualiser. Displaying how a response evolves, how it responds to input, is useful in its own right but it’s the act of taking suggestions from students, weighing them together and then demonstrating how to put them in place that will help us answer the question, how do I know all students have understood what is being taught?
In the next, and final post in this series, I’ll tackle how we know whether students are getting better at the skills we want them to master.
References
Ausubel, D. (1968) Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View
MacLeod, C. M., Gopie, N., Hourihan, K. L., Neary, K. R., & Ozubko, J. D. (2010). The production effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(3), 671–685.
Nuthall, G. (2007). The Hidden Lives of Learners.
Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255
Rowe, M. B. (1972). Wait-Time and Rewards as Instructional Variables: Their Influence on Language, Logic, and Fate Control. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 11(2), 81–94.
Constructive feedback is always appreciated