chapter 18- program planning and achievement measures for social studies learning topics provincial...

Chapter 18- Program Planning and Achievement Measures

for Social StudiesLearning Topics

Provincial Guidelines: An AnalysisDynamic Planning for Social Studies

Integrating Social Studies in an Inquiry Based ProgramEngaging Culminating Tasks: A Transformative Perspective

Authentic Assessments: Adding New Approaches to an Assessment PlanYear at a Glance Long Range Planning for the Primary and Junior Classroom

Templates for Planning Social Studies Programs

Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education Canada 18 - 1

“Making the right choices as a teacher depends on knowing the kinds of errors or mistakes students are likely to make, being able to identify such mistakes students are likely to make, being able to identify such mistakes when they occur, and being prepared to address the sources of students’ errors in ways that will result in student learning” (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).


Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers

What is to be Assessed?• Provincial and territorial guidelines across jurisdictions and over time vary in

the effectiveness of the guidance they provide for teachers in relation to assessment.

• Assessment at the classroom level is challenging for teachers because there may be some misalignments among messages about assessment from the various sources of information that teachers use to plan programs.

• Standards for assessment are typically provided in statements of expectations in provincial or territorial guidelines.

• Assessments may be mandated by provincial bodies or within Boards of Education at the local level.

• Instructional approaches are usually developed by individual teachers. • Even though teachers must make the final decisions about the quality of

students’ achievement, the task is compounded when the standards, assessments, and instruction are determined by different levels of educational governance and enacted by different groups (Martone & Sireci, 2009).



Embodied Assessment• To bridge the gap among the mandates provided by different

levels of educational authority and structure, the classroom teacher must be able to analyze the alignment of the messages.

• The valued assessments should reflect the standards that are determined to be central to the aligned ideas from all sources.

• When the tasks that we ask students to do to demonstrate their learning are in alignment with the criteria and standards that are identified in provincial/territorial guidelines and provide clarity of direction for students, the alignment is complete in range and depth. Shepard (2003) refers to this as embodiment of assessment.



Planning for Embodied Assessment

• Teachers need to examine these components and address the question, “What is the student who is well educated in Social Studies to know, value and be able to do?”

• Identifying these characteristics provides the vision of the learner that is the starting point of good planning.



• “…devising assessments that embody the standards and goals of instruction is central to good teaching, not just a matter of measuring outcomes.” (Shepard et al, 2005)

• The wide variety of assessment formats helps to ensure that the assessment captures the important learning.

• Assessment can be integrated and unobtrusive in learning if the widest possible range of strategies for assessment is used.

• The bias inherent in single forms of assessment is avoided when multiple forms are used throughout the program.



The Importance of Feedback• Embodied assessment is only possible when students receive

meaningful, timely, and detailed feedback to support their growth toward the criteria and standards of assessment.

• Formative feedback is growth focused and relies on students receiving information that relates the student’s work to stated criteria, provides exemplars, identifies strengths and specific areas that need improvement, and allows for both time and support for improvement.

• When assessment is embodied in the program planning, teachers will observe growth on an ongoing basis and will have the time and criteria to revise assessment decisions as they observe from many sources.



Dynamic Planning for Social Studies• A common saying among those who teach new teachers to plan

is, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. • To be sure that planning is effective for the delivery of a dynamic

Social Studies program, teachers must ensure an understanding of their own curriculum conceptions and of how these conceptions grow with experience and professional development.

• Once teachers understand that program expectations or objectives, instructional strategies, and assessments must be mutually supportive to guide learning, they can begin to consider the parameters that influence the intended curriculum, the taught curriculum, and the learned curriculum.



Low or High Stakes Assessment?• Well aligned and embodied Social Studies plans

will ensure that the consequences of assessment are reflective of the activity that represents the students’ opportunities to learn in the classroom.

• Some assessment consequences may be low stakes, such as giving the student further instruction.

• Other consequences may be higher stakes in nature, such as withholding promotion.



Consequences of Assessment

Add Figure 1 here



Strengthening Formative Feedback

Students can assess their evidence against exemplar evidence to make specific criterion and standards based plans for improvement.

Students can provide specific evidence that aspects of their work meet criteria and standards.

Students can use the criteria and standards for assessment, described on a continuum of growth to plan for their personal improvement toward highest standards.

Teachers can use the criteria and standards for assessment, described on a continuum of growth to plan formative assessment feedback to guide students’ improvement.

Teacher and students are equally aware of the criteria and standards for assessment, developed on a continuum to describe students’ growth.

Teacher is aware of criteria for assessing big ideas and is able to use them to develop a continuum of standards to envision students’ growth.

Teacher is aware of criteria for big ideas in the learning and is able to use them to develop a single set of standards.



The Problems with Imposed Testing• When testing is mandated from other levels in the educational spectrum

(e.g., provincial/territorial, national or international assessments) it may have several impacts on program. (Roach, Niebling & Kurz, 2008; M.L. Smith & Rottenberg,1991)

Such testing may:• Reduce teaching time because test preparation and administration

requires classroom time• Narrow the curriculum to over-emphasize elements that are anticipated to

be the focus of external assessment• Limit opportunities to assess higher order thinking such as analysis,

synthesis ,and evaluation because of the test structure and the limitations of this form of assessment

• Decrease morale among students and teachers when control of what is learned is reduced.



Learning New Ways to Assess

• Overcoming the limitations of traditional assessment in their daily practice and planning for assessment that is integrated with instruction is particularly challenging for many teachers because they may have experienced few, if any, models of effective assessments in their background as students.

• If they teach as they were taught and assess and as they were assessed, teachers are unlikely to provide their students with a full range of opportunities to pursue and later demonstrate their learning.

• Effective professional development in understanding and using authentic assessment is essential for teachers.



Factors that may explain the researched benefits of testing(Adapted from Shepard et al, 2005)

• Testing provides further exposure to the content and engages students in review and relearning.

• Testing requires students to act on information and address it through mental processing.

• Testing may direct students’ attention to key ideas within a topic, which in turn may direct further study.

• Testing may help students understand the criteria and standards for assessment and create mutual understanding of them.



Getting the Assessment Right

• When planning effective Social Studies programs, teachers must consider what and how they will assess learning early in the planning process.

• By aligning and embodying their assessment practices into their program planning, using backward design principles, teachers can ensure that the most appropriate approaches to assessment enrich their program and help them to measure what they intend for students to learn.



Integrating Social Studies in an Inquiry Based Program

• Determining what we will teach, how we will teach it, and how we will assess what we have taught are the central considerations of effective program planning.

• These align with the three key elements of instructional pedagogy: content, process, and product.

• These elements of pedagogy are shared by all subject areas in the curriculum.

• In the primary and junior grades, it is common and often valuable to use integrated approaches to curriculum planning. Integration has many advantages for both students and teachers.



The Advantages of Integrating Other Subjects with Social Studies Include:

• Instructional time can be optimized.

• Students can see connections among topics.

• Processes that are common across subject areas (e.g., reading graphs and tables) can be taught once and practised many times in different applications.

• Products can be designed to be more sophisticated and can draw from real world knowledge that is not separated along academic lines.

• Greater depth of understanding is possible if students can see several uses of new learning.

• Rich resources that are multi-dimensional can be used.

• Social justice applications can be more realistic because they draw knowledge from many subject backgrounds.

• Skill transfer is facilitated when students see new opportunities to use what they have learned.



Inquiry and Integration

• As teachers plan for integration, it is critical to keep the standards of each subject area in mind.

• Inquiry is an approach that is synonymous with strong teaching in Social Studies.

• In Social Studies, teachers strive to achieve learning outcomes through inquiry.

• Integration supports rich inquiry.Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education Canada 18 - 18


Engaging Culminating Tasks: A Transformative Perspective

• In Chapter 17, we examined ways to design culminating tasks and their role in unit design.

• Culminating tasks are designed to provide students with encompassing opportunities to demonstrate their learning of the big ideas or enduring understandings from a unit of study.

• Culminating tasks should be designed to take account of the students’ age, interests, literacy levels, readiness, and strengths.

• These tasks are designed to highlight what the student does know about the topic, not to pinpoint what the student does not know.



Using Choice

• Choice is an essential element of well designed culminating tasks.

• By offering choice, teachers build in strategies for differentiation, improve their own diagnostic skills, and prepare to support learning styles within the group of students (Grossman, Schoenfeld & Lee, 2005).

• These abilities help teachers become better teachers of all students.



Supporting Culminating Tasks

Teachers need to be fully involved in students’ selection, design, and completion of culminating tasks.

During these processes, teachers have several complementary roles: They intervene when students need support. They monitor progress and guide changes of direction, looking for

problems, misconceptions, resource needs, and stalls in progress. They support revisions of the product to guide students to deeper

understanding. They ensure safety as students pursue plans.



The Characteristics of Well Designed Culminating Tasks

• Well designed culminating tasks allow students to continue to learn as they reflect on ideas about a topic and provide a venue for ongoing learning as students investigate further through strategic instruction as students have an applied need for new knowledge or skills, with emphasis on the processes of effective learning.

• By their nature, culminating tasks have a metacognitive, self-assessment component.

• Teachers can build in structures to culminating tasks to help students articulate what they know and compare their efforts to the criteria and standards for the specific task and the discipline of Social Studies.

• By building flexible choices and opportunities for divergence within a culminating task, teachers can ensure the potential for accommodations and modifications, and allow time for strategic (as needed) instruction throughout the task time.



Transformation

• Ultimately, the culminating task should be designed with transformative goals of the discipline in mind.

• Tasks should allow students latitude to become aware of their personal assumptions about a topic, to challenge their assumptions and those of other students, and move forward with their age appropriate role related to social justice issues.

• Culminating tasks should be big classroom events, and given the time and attention they need to serve as recognition of students’ learning over time.



Authentic Assessments: Adding New Approaches to an Assessment Plan

• Assessment should not be separate from learning. • Rather, the learning purpose of assessment should help

to guide the teacher’s selection of assessment approaches.

• Historically, 95% of assessment data obtained through tests has provided information about students’ knowledge, understanding, and ability to apply ideas (Madeus, West, Harmon, Lomax & Viator, 1992).

• This tendency has excluded opportunities for students to represent deeper understanding at the analysis, synthesis, creation, and evaluation levels.



Fitting the Assessment to the Learning

• The educational psychologist Maslow once said, “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

• This quote can also apply to teachers’ breadth of understanding and skill with the use of a wide range of assessment techniques.

• If the teacher only knows how to use tests to determine students’ level of understanding, they will tend to see all learning as testable.

• By expanding their range of ways to assess learning, teachers can assess the breadth and depth of students’ learning relative to many learning expectations that may not be readily measured through testing.



Adding New Strategies for Assessment• As authentic assessments become the norm in the classroom,

teachers will see the benefits of increased student interest, students’ involvement in their own assessment, ongoing support for achievement, stronger scaffolding through strategic teaching, and increased ownership of the learning as students learn new strategies for self-monitoring (Shepard et al, 2005).

• Through experience, teachers will learn to set high standards and provide optimal support for high achievement within a classroom where a broad range of culminating tasks is being pursued simultaneously.

• Converging sources of evidence about students’ learning will help teachers improve their instruction and support the diversity of learners’ needs in their classrooms.Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education Canada 18 - 26


Year at a Glance Long Range Planning for the Primary and Junior Classroom

• Long range planning is the first step in effective course design, followed by unit planning and lesson planning.

• Long range planning is essential to help teachers manage time, resources, and learning expectations in a busy and productive learning environment.

• These plans provide a rough but flexible and responsive outline of the units to be taught for the entire year.

• They provide a roadmap over time.



Planning Templates

See your textbook for planning templates to support:

• Rubric development• Independent Inquiry Planning by students• Long Range/Year-at-a-Glance Planning• Unit development• Assessment and Evaluation Planning for a Unit



Student-Led Parent Teacher Conferences

• Student-led-parent-teacher conferences are not new to education but they are not widely used in some jurisdictions.

• These conferences can be very valuable sources of communication with parents and help students take ownership for their learning and monitor their progress more specifically.

• Both students and parents report enjoying such opportunities to talk to each other about the student’s work and to do this in a structured environment where the student is responsible for presenting their work in detail and justifying their summative grades.



Preparing for Student-Led Parent Teacher Conferences

• Successful student-led-parent-teacher conferences rely on careful preparation prior to these interviews.

• Both the teacher and the student have roles in the preparation. • The teacher must explain the purpose and process of these

interviews to school administration, parents, and students. • Students must be taught to start, monitor, and contribute to a

developing portfolio that represents their work over time. • Parents must be told about how these interviews will function

and how the student will be involved. • Parents need to be told about the interviews well in advance

and provided with reminders of specific times and dates.



Chapter Review

• Guidelines provide varying amounts of support and direction for teachers in the use of classroom assessment.

• Standards for assessment are usually provided in guideline assessment statements.

• Standards, assessments, and instructional decisions may be made at different levels of educational governance, creating some alignment disparities.

• Assessment is embodied when the expectation criteria, standards, and strategies for assessment match.

• Start planning for embodied assessment by aligning the vision of the learner with the learning expectations to identify the big ideas or enduring understandings to be learned.

• There are many research based reasons for using a wide range of embodied assessment techniques.



• Meaningful, timely, and detailed feedback are critical to effective formative assessment.

• Formative feedback must reflect the learning criteria and standards identified in expectations.

• Not all expectations provided in guidelines support understanding of big ideas nor are worth measuring.

• Sound planning closes the gaps among the intended, taught, and learned curriculum.

• Content validity is the degree to which the assessment approach represents a valid measurement of what it is intended to measure.

• The structure of test questions is critical to their successful use in assessment.



• Testing should be used cautiously and represents only one of many assessment strategies.

• Testing that is mandated from agencies outside of the classroom may have impacts on teaching time, topic coverage, levels of understanding, and classroom morale.

• Students’ expectation that they will be tested may result in students learning more about the topic.

• A balance of assessment approaches creates a bank of evidence from many sources that testifies to students’ learning.

• Units are often integrated across subject areas in primary and junior grades, providing many curriculum advantages.



• When Social Studies is integrated an inquiry approach must be central to the strategies used to maintain a focus on a central way of knowing within the discipline.

• Pedagogical content knowledge allows teachers to access a broad range of strategies to ensure the best approach is used to achieve each learning expectation.

• Culminating tasks allow students to demonstrate their understanding of big ideas.

• Culminating task products are a form of summative assessment.

• Teachers shift across many supportive roles as students engage in the completion of culminating tasks.



• Culminating tasks should be designed to extend the learning, not intrude into it.

• Various forms of assessment address different levels of learning.

• Time engaged in completing culminating tasks is time when teachers can do strategic (as needed) teaching to individuals or small groups.

• Year-at-a-glance planning promotes effective course design.

• Standard templates for some aspects of planning support program development that maintains a focus on the criteria and standards of the discipline.

• Student-led-parent-teacher conferences support authentic assessment principles.



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