‘Getting It Wrong’: Scantron Achievement Exercises as Best Practice

‘Getting It Wrong’: Scantron Achievement Exercises as Best Practice

In education, a “best practice” is the belief that one activity or method produces a better outcome than alternatives. As educators, we crave best practices because it allows us to place better bets for optimizing student learning. When we began the practice of holding weekly math exercises to see what students knew, I thought it was a best practice because those assessments are based on grade level state standards and allow us to pinpoint our teaching to what students did not know. Spreading out the standards across the year allows us to monitor student math attainment in grades 2-8 in fine detail and to remediate where necessary on very specific skills. In some cases, students had already learned the material, in others they had just learned it, and in still others students had never seen the material before, but every Monday, students in grades 2-8 have the opportunity to show us what they know in math.

At least two parents have asked whether it makes sense to assess students on math concepts and skills they have never seen and then teach those concepts and skills after the assessment. Intuitively, their concern makes sense, because students typically do poorly on material they have not been taught, especially skilled subjects like math. In fact, most of us learned this way: the teacher instructs the class, the students study what they are supposed to learn, and then the teacher gives some kind of assessment to determine what learning has taken place. Our intuition about that process being the right one probably comes from our experience in school.

Recently published research in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied lead us to a startling, counterintuitive conclusion: students actually learn more if they are assessed on material before they are taught the material. When I read about this research in the October 20 edition of Scientific American (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong), I had to read what it implies twice, so I will write it again in case you think that you misread something or that I mistyped it, this time quoting from the article: “Learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so students make errors.” For us, that means that students who are behind in math and have to fight their way through weekly math exercises and then learn the concepts learn more than if they had studied for the exercises ahead of time. To put it another way, from the perspective of this research in experimental psychology, Scantron weekly math exercises are a best practice for those who are behind in math.

The claim that one practice is a “best practice” is not a claim to absolute truth, and certainly not the end of the discussion of how best to educate students. Rather, it is a belief that must be continually tested. We rarely have the kind of conditions that would allow us to test our practices scientifically, but if we measure the outcomes we are getting, we can at least reduce the uncertainty about the effectiveness of our educational practices. One measurement of the effectiveness of the Scantron math exercises is the attainment of students over time. I will be reporting on that measurement, and others, in the presentation of the dashboard at the November Board meeting.