Main Area
Measuring Improvement
School improvement can be thought of as action research. The goal of this research is to find lesson designs or curriculum that most effectively helps students achieve proficiency of state or national standards.
Almost all written school improvement efforts are based on changing the curriculum, the instruction or the level of parental involvement. It is the first two that schools have the most control, but it is these, the curriculum and instructional strategies actually used in classrooms that are rarely truly addressed through measurement.
Many schools adopt new curricular materials with the hope that through some magic, students will show higher achievement. A major problem is that school administration rarely knows what curriculum is actually delivered. In many cases the actual curricular content is left to individuals to choose to deliver or not as they see fit. We have seen schools adopt and purchase new materials only to find that teachers duplicate and use the same materials they have used in the past—and when the students show no improved achievement, the new materials are blamed as being no better than the old. In some (actually in many) cases the delivered curriculum varies greatly from the written curriculum in both content and rigor. It is not uncommon for the learning experience in the same subject to vary completely from one room to another even though a school has adopted a common curriculum. It is essential that all teachers deliver a common curriculum if changes to that curriculum are to have any measurable effect on student achievement.
Improved student achievement of skills and knowledge as compared to some standard set of skills and knowledge is the goal of all school improvement plans. Unfortunately, most schools use standardized measures that indicate either the current achievement level or the likely achievement level of students at some future date. Schools and teachers are then asked to develop some intervention plan to increase student achievement during a specific period of time. Most often improvement plans focus on changing the curriculum—either adopting new or incorporating curriculum focusing on student deficits. While most schools pay service to the importance of the actual delivery of curriculum, few actually verify what portions of the curriculum are actually being delivered.
How a teacher delivers the curriculum is likely the most important aspect of any school, yet it is often the least well scrutinized. The educational literature has long acknowledged the importance of matching the delivery strategies to the learning style of an individual student, yet we find that many, many classroom strategies begin and end with the teacher lecturing and showing students how to do something. During the initial testing of Looking at Learning, we found that traditional teacher lecture is still a very common strategy used in our schools. In many schools with lower student performance, lecture, direct instruction and guided practice seem to make up the bulk of the instruction. In many of these classrooms, students are being asked to sit quietly and passively as the teacher works hard to go through the curriculum.
If we are to believe the research as reported by Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde and have students become more actively involved in their education, it is important to know what is currently happening that has led to the current student achievement. With the knowledge of what is currently happening with curriculum and the delivery of the curriculum, teachers and teams will have the information necessary to make delivery changes and then observe the resulting changes in achievement.
Measurement is the foundation of any improvement effort. Without measurement conducting any kind of formal or informal action research as to what strategies give the best results is simply not possible. Without measurement, without data, all we have are opinions of what is taking place. In today’s educational environment, knowing what works with the students that walk through our doors is critical. Educators are good at measuring the results, now is the time to measure, to know, what happened to get those results.
Looking at Learning was designed to fill the measurement gap of what is happening in classrooms. In the past, most of the measurement done in classrooms has focused on what the teachers is doing. A few tools, notably some found in Reading First, look at what the students are doing. We believe that the most important aspects of classroom measurement are to look at what the students are being asked to do in a lesson, not what the teacher is actually doing.
The cognitive content of a lesson is thought to likely be critical to a student’s successfully constructing understanding. It is true that many teachers with successful students seem to design lessons where students know what they are trying to learn or practice. While this would seem to be obvious, many lessons seem designed with the cognitive content evolving out of the lesson, but never stated or discussed. These lessons seem designed to let the student figure out for themselves what they were trying to learn and this design has mixed results. The work by Wiggins and McTighe indicates that it is important for the teacher to plan how to make the students aware of what they are learning as they are learning it. For example, it is likely more effective and efficient for students to know that they are learning to summarize before they start reading something to be summarized. However, we find many lessons where the students are asked to read a passage and then the teacher jumps right into discussing what was read without the students knowing why they are reading or what they are to do once they have read the passage. It is more effective for students to know that they will be learning to summarize, and what summarizing entails before they start reading.
We have found many classrooms all but void of students knowing the cognitive reason for what they are being asked to do. Effective teachers seem to not leave this to chance, but rather spend time at the start of each lesson making sure that students understand what they are trying to learn.
At this point in our understanding, it is not know what proportions of the various cognitive purposes are most effective. However we do know that lessons where the students are not aware of why they are learning something, are likely not effective. We know that substantial time being spent on helping students understand concepts (big ideas) and reviewing what was learned at the end of each lesson, pays substantial dividends for students. It is with the importance of measuring the cognitive content from the student’s point of view, that Looking at Learning was designed to include this important part of any lesson.
Looking at Learning has been designed to allow teachers and teams to look critically into their curriculum delivery. Measuring both the student results and the delivery that produced those results allows teachers to adjust the delivery and know the effects of the delivery changes on student learning. It is with this critical knowledge of both the delivery and the student results that schools can make real gains in their student’s performance on state and national standards.