Discussion topics for week two

Achievement Levels

Teaching Methods

The challenge many teachers face in assessment is given prominence in the article that discusses the use of modified T/F questions as tools to provide additional elements of students thinking. The author notes that by themselves T/F questions are not highly demanding in terms of high order thinking. The student is not required to expend cognitive effort to produce coherent thought that provides the teacher with a vista to the students thinking.

If one accepts the proposition that the act of learning involves thinking and writing. In fact, it can be considered as one process so that writing is learning and thinking. Thus during the process of writing the individual is unable to partition the components. What should be encouraged more in learning environments is greater writing. Through the simple act of writing and responding to ideas opportunity is given to think about the ideas and relate to them.

Singly the T/F question does not provide the necessary thinking component that is required to aid in teacher comprehension of student understanding. When it is combined with a writing element, it is a useful mechanism to assess student thinking. The authors demonstrated this by assessing student response to several T/F question from the discipline of economics. The written responses demonstrated that while a student may get the question correct; the thinking that went into arriving at the correct response was faulty. The teacher is able to determine whether the student has correctly interpreted the question and has applied the correct conceptual parameters to arriving at the response.

Consequently, the teacher is not only provided with answers to the questions on the test but also to questions relating to student understanding. The teacher may be able to understand why students give such incorrect responses to questions, where the ideas were discussed in class and the teacher felt the concepts were sufficiently clear. Additionally, students felt that the approach was very useful, from a sample of 28 students only 2 students did not find the tool useful. The students felt that they also benefit from having the teacher observe their thinking processes and make assessments based on the combination of T/F and the explanation provided for their thinking.

The issues raised in this article are very important. I agree with the proposition that thinking and writing are linked; so that you can understand elements of thinking through writing. However, I am not certain that it is such a strong correlation that you can determine thinking through writing. Thinking is much more complex than what can be discerned from what a student places on the script as a response. I would also add that to place a response requires thinking processes that are not mapped. By this, I mean that I am not sure what is actually measured when you assess the students writing. What level of thinking are you assessing? Some students may be able to provide the correct response but they cannot successfully articulate the processes that were employed to arrive at that position.

I am in complete agreement with the need to create tools that are more adequate to measure the success of information transfer and learning. I thought that the researchers did a good job by utilizing a common tool but modifying it in such a manner that it provided them with wider usage and more data than originally intended. I applaud this innovation and readily suggest this as a unique and valuable aspect of the work.