How do we know what our students know?

Traditionally, teachers have always used exams, tests, and quizzes to assess student knowledge of a concept.  However, in the process, it is hard to know whether or not students are actually paying attention and taking in the information the teacher specifically wants them to know.  Teachers may use homework assignments and such as assessments along the way, but even with homework assignments, students may receive help from others or may work different when under home conditions as opposed to school conditions and vice versa.   It is especially discouraging when the students’ assessments reflect they didn’t learn a thing.  Most importantly, what these standard forms of assessment don’t cover, as well, is how students derived that information. I can remember sitting in 10th grade Geometry class while students around me passed around a graphing calculator that had the answers to all the proofs typed on it.  They passed the calculator around, that student copied all the answers and they passed it to the next student.  The teacher never knew what was happening. Everyone received their high scores and moved on to the next concept. All the while, the teacher concluded that the way he was teaching was a great job and continued to do the same old lecture and notes he’d done for decades thus far.  

This obviously doesn’t work with the classrooms of today with trying to invoke an inquiry based learner.  We teachers need not only to see if the student can derive the “correct” answer, but whether or not the student understands HOW and WHY they got that answer.  As well as working on the “hows” and “whys” of content, we are also trying to teach our learners to be able to ask questions to help their learning and measure their learning process along the way.

When I taught 7th grade Advanced Math many moons ago, I would often “quiz” my students when we finished a concept.  Though it was the traditional paper and pencil quiz, I would often insert self-assessment based questions along the way in the quiz.  I would also, in addition to the correct answer, include a section with the problem that asked students to explain their process of receiving that answer or what they’re thinking was in getting that answer. As a Math teacher, this helped me not just mark answers right or wrong, but see where my students’ thinking was deriving and how they were working the problems and help them find the correct answer or use the correct method by going through those steps with students. 

I think in addition to asking your students to explain their logic and reasoning is also getting to know your students.  We, as teachers, are with our students 8-9 months out of the year, it is our responsibility to know how our students learn, what makes them tick and what their interests are. This isn’t just filling out an “All About Me” checklist at the beginning of the year and that’s that.  It is more about interacting and observing your students on a daily basis as well as learning what interests them, what makes them happy, angry and sad. We get to know which learners prefer pencil and paper over videos on the Promethean board. We know which students are better at investigations and which are visual and auditory learners.  Once we know all about our student, we can easily know what they know and we can assess that knowledge.