A Possibility: Standards Across Disciplines
I talk a lot about labs. I am aware that it may be a turn-off to those of you who aren’t science teachers, since you don’t use that type of assessment. However, I believe that the lab skills that I seek to develop must have parallels with assessment done in other disciplines. To that end, please compare your own course goals to the things that I consider valuable when students conduct and write up a lab. These fall into seven categories.
- Backwards-Design and Planning: When given a task, students develop a question. When asking a question, they imagine a possible answer. When answering the question, they think about what analysis they can do to generate the answer. In order to conduct that analysis, they identify the needed data. In order to gather the data, they identify what tools will be used. While this can be modified, they do this before carrying out any experiment.
- Writing Narrative Prose: Students write a first-person narrative that has enough detail for another to duplicate the experiment. The coherent description outlines the set-up and procedure for data collection, with all materials used embedded within the paragraph. Including a clear depiction of how equipment was used, they need to answer the question “What did you actually do?”
- Organization of Data: Students need to organize and clearly label all of the measurements by creating a data table. The audience should quickly ascertain the quantities with corresponding measurement units. The table should clearly display independent and dependent variables, as well as unchanging quantities.
- Reliability and Uncertainty: What makes evidence reliable, relevant, persuasive, sophisticated, and convincing? At the eleventh grade, we investigate why individual data points are less persuasive than a trendline, why we conduct multiple trials, and why we need at least 5 data points to see a clear trend, amongst other concerns.
- Evaluation of Data: Students dig into the difference between precision and accuracy, as well as different methods of communicating these. We investigate the question of how much our expectations, preconceptions, and/or theoretical knowledge influence our results. Another interesting situation that often surfaces is, “What is a self-fulfilling prophecy or circular reasoning?”
- Communication: Students seem to think that more is always better. I spend a lot of time training them how to communicate succinctly but with enough detail to bring the audience to their conclusion.
- Using Research: Students don’t always know how to balance citing the facts, concepts, and theories with their interpretation. They need to prove that they know what they are talking about, then flesh it out with the application to the question at hand.
Do you see parallels with your own goals? Do we share skill-sets, even though the medium may be different? Could we write standards that are general enough to use cross-curriculum, but specific enough to use in assessment?
I imagine that yes, we could. For example, we all want students to write well, communicating with clarity, concision, and adequate detail. We all expect students to apply some organizational structure to the task, in order to guide the audience through an argument or proof, whether short answer, essay, or research paper. We all want students to apply the concepts learned in our class, clearly demonstrating connections between multiple topics when appropriate.
There are also some skills that perhaps science shares with math, and others that science shares with humanities. But there is overlap. If we could find those aspects, students would see that the compartmentalization of “math”, “history”, “science”, “world language”, “fine arts” is indeed an artificial construct. The skills they learn in one class show up and are reinforced in others. There are more similarities than differences between courses.
If we can shift our thinking from content as the driver of our class, to content as the medium through which common skills are practiced, then we can give students a truly valuable gift: transferrable skills, in which high performance in one class translates into high performance in other classes. No more “I’m not good at math!” It would turn into “I need to work on my problem-solving skills, because I struggle with that in my math and science classes.” Or “I’m a terrible writer,” might turn into “I struggle with incorporating facts from my notes/research into my writing, but if I learn how to do that I will improve in science, English, world history, and Spanish.” Imagine? But to do this, educators themselves have to see these common threads and reinforce them. What is assessed is what is perceived as important. Therefore, our assessment must shift from compartmentalized within our classrooms to department-wide or school-wide. What do you think? Is this possible?
