Yesterday I shared some thoughts about pretesting that were prompted by a year-old post by Scott McCleod. Today, I came across another year-old blog post, this time by Angela Meiers. In this article, she talks about how comprehension is not something that can be contained in a discrete list of facts and skills, but rather it is an ongoing, recursive process of applying those facts and skills to build a picture of the world.

It occurs to me that what we often do in school is something like handing the students a birdhouse kit. The pieces are pre-measured and pre-cut, and everything we need is already there. We walk them all step-by-step through the assembly of the kit, focusing on their technique in hammering and gluing. It doesn’t matter that some of the kids have designed and built their own birdhouses, and others haven’t ever seen a bird before. At the end of the lesson, everyone in the class has an identical birdhouse–though perhaps we allow them to choose their own colors for the paint.

Rather than giving a pretest that runs through all of the discrete skills in a unit (“explain how to hammer a nail without bending it”, “which goes on first, the roof or the base?”), consider giving your students a one-question pretest that gets at the most important aspects of the unit you are going to teach: “Draw a design for a birdhouse and explain how you would build it.” Here are some sample One-Question Pretests that might work in various subject areas:

• Explain how America became an independent country
• Pretzels come in bags of 24 and you want to give one to each of the 473 students in our school. Figure out how many bags we need to buy and show how you computed the answer without a calculator.
• Where do new plants come from, and how do they grow?
• Tell me what grade you should get for this class, and write a paragraph that convinces me you’ve earned it.
• Read the beginning of this story and write what you think will happen next. Explain why you think so.

While you wouldn’t get discrete data on what specific skills and knowledge your students have, a careful reading and analysis of the students’ responses can give you a wealth of information that would be immensely helpful in planning your instruction. It wouldn’t take any more time than a traditional pretest. If you embed it into other activities, such as including the pretest as a learning center activity that all students will complete over the course of a week during normal rotations, it might even take less time.

How can you apply the One-Question Pretest idea to your own subject and grade level?

Abandoned School, by Terence Faircloth, 8/7/08

Much has been written about the changing needs of students in the 21st century and the transformation that must take place in our schools to make it happen. Several things are clear to me as I read them. First, it is going to take a visionary administration to remake the environment in which our schools operate in order for those changes to be possible. Second, like a mile-long freight train being switched onto another track, it will take a very long time for the needed changes to work their way down to the local level.

It took several years for No Child Left Behind to shift the focus of our schools from students to test scores, but that shift happened. In the meantime, the world shifted, too. What we really need now is No School Left Behind. Schools need to become more agile, more proactive, more willing to look ten or twenty years into the future instead of one or two.

If this website is any indication of the administration to come—one that not only listens to its consitutents, but actively invites their participation in the government—it has the necessary vision and determination. But even greater than this, it just underscores how much different a world tomorrow’s citizens will inhabit. We truly need to empower our students with the skills that Robert Sternberg calls the “other three R’s”: Reasoning, Resilience, and Responsibility.

None of those are on the PSSA test. But they’re all on the real one: life.

David Warlick posted an article yesterday about where the line is between creativity and cheating.

Over and over again I read about these kinds of issues, and it keeps reminding me that as an educator, I need to rethink the way I assess my students. Even in elementary school, this kind of problem has been around for years—except in our case the “outsourcing” often means that the parents did the work for the child.

They are often well-meaning, to a point, wanting the best for their child—meaning of course the best grade. But rather than bemoaning the fact that our students (and parents) try to find the loopholes in the assignment, we need to find different ways of getting at what our kids know, understand, and are able to do.

I think it’s also important to be much more transparent about exactly what we’re looking for and why we want them to do what we’re asking. Tell them up front that the goal is not a working computer program, for example, but that it’s about the problem solving process they used to get there. So maybe we need to assess the student’s whole process—including notes and false starts and bug-filled code that won’t compile–and ask them to write about how they were able to get it working.

I also think it’s important to teach students how to use resources effectively. Instead of scolding someone for going out and getting other people involved in a project, design assignments/assessments that encourage or even require it, and assess how well the student is able to integrate the help they get into the final product.