Assessing how students learn

Here are some excerpts from Bill Cerbin’s article, “Assessing How Students Learn,” from the web site of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching:

By measuring what students learn educators can monitor student progress, determine learning gaps and gains, and document achievement.

But measuring what students learn is of limited use if our goal is to improve their future performance. It is akin to taking a person's temperature. You may learn the individual has a fever but the measurement produces no insight into the cause.

To reduce the guesswork we need assessment that reveals how students learn - how they interpret and make sense of the subject, where they stumble, what they do when they do not understand the material, how they respond to different instructional practices, and so on. Understanding the basis of student performance can help us identify appropriate teaching practices or approaches.

Encouraging teachers to assess student learning as it takes place in the classroom can help them answer questions about how and why the gaps exist. Assessing how students learn can lead to the kind of information we need to make decisions about how to improve teaching and learning.

A compelling example of this form of assessment is the Berkeley calculus project which took place more than 25 years ago…

And now, for the rest of the story...