Category: Assessment (Fall 2011)
Sally Mayer teaches Talmud and is a mentor at Midreshet Lindenbaum in Jerusalem. She was a member of the core faculty at Ma'ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls (Teaneck, NJ), and was Education Director at The Jewish Center in Manhattan.
Sally Mayer shares her experience setting and maintaining standards with a program that emphasizes review and focused assessment that helps pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.
When I began to teach at Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls in Teaneck, NJ, the school was in its second year. Under the leadership of Mrs. Esther Krauss, the atmosphere was full of a sense of possibility, of thinking anew about teaching and taking nothing for granted. During the seven years that I taught at the school before moving to Israel, I did a lot of thinking about and experimenting with assessment and grading, partially inspired by conferences I attended where I heard Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe present on the topic. The following is a report about some of the work I did in two areas, knowledge retention and communicating clear, measurable goals.
Build, review and drill
Very often, we as teachers are frustrated when we mention a concept, a pasuk, a vocabulary word that the students encountered in a lesson a month ago, and we find that many of them do not recall what they learned. If it was three or four months ago, or last year, there is almost no one present who remembers, and therefore they cannot build upon or apply that knowledge to the next issue. When I began the year teaching 10th grade Talmud at Ma’ayanot in 1997, I added a piece to the tests I wrote in order to try to tackle this problem. After receiving approval from the principal, I added a “hazarah (review) section” on each exam. This section covered basic understanding of and ability to punctuate the Talmudic passages from the previous units we had learned, and vocabulary words. The format of the section was multiple choice or short answer, and it was worth approximately 20% of the grade on the test
The students’ reaction was predictable – when I first announced that there would be a review section on the second exam, there was a little grumbling. By the fourth or fifth test, the students complained that it was too much to have to review everything they had learned. At the time, we were covering about four to five dapim of Gemara per year, with commentaries (each “daf” has 2 sides, or amudim, so this was about 8-10 pages of Talmud by the end of the year). I tried to alleviate their concerns in two ways. On a technical level, I explained that the final exam was going to be cumulative in any case, so reviewing throughout the year would mean that they could relax on the day before the Gemara final, since they would know the Gemara almost by heart by then. They accepted that the final would be cumulative (though some students and parents requested that only each semester be cumulative, to which I did not accede), and this mollified many of them. On a more fundamental level, I encouraged them that this was a way to remember and be equipped to apply what they have learned, and to really own the Gemara they were learning.
What were the results? The students did remember the material well, felt a sense of mastery, and applied their knowledge to future learning. A number of years later I taught the same group of students in 12th grade whom I had previously taught in 10th grade, and in the class there was a young woman who had not been a stellar Gemara in our previous encounter. One of the first Talmudic passages that we learned in her senior year was from the tractate Sanhedrin, in which Rabbi Hanina maintains that a decree was made by the Sages to lower the Biblical requirements regarding judges on a court deciding monetary matters, to try to encourage people to lend money to others in need. This student raised her hand and suggested that Rabbi Hanina’s position is similar to a passage we had learned in the tractate Kiddushin at the very beginning of 10th grade, in which according to Rabbi Yohanan, the Sages decreed that movable property transfers from the ownership of a seller to that of a buyer not after the money changes hands, as is the Biblical law, but only after the buyer picks it up. This decree was made to avoid a situation in which the seller, who is no longer the owner, does not bother to save the items if a fire breaks out in his domain. She suggested that these were both cases in which the Sages used their power over money and property to modify halakhic practice in order to accomplish a social goal. I remember being totally shocked that this student had remembered a case from two years earlier and connected it so beautifully with new material she was learning! At the end of each year, many students came over to me to say that while it was a great challenge at the time, they appreciated at the end how much they had gained.
This system can be applied in various ways. When the volume of material is greater, it is very difficult to demand a completely cumulative review. Furthermore, if all teachers in a school applied this method in all classes, it would create an undue burden on the students. However, a teacher can (and in my opinion, should) pinpoint the major concepts, facts, words, or whatever it might be, and review that material on future tests. When Wiggins and McTighe speak of “enduring understandings,” the big ideas that we want students to remember forever, they suggest that teachers consider what the students should know and remember after forty minutes, after forty days, and after forty years (see mathscienceproject.pbworks.com/f/BBBMS+UBD.ppt). This idea can be applied here as well, not only to enduring understandings, but also to knowledge of facts: What do we want the students to remember for a long time? The teacher can choose those most important facts, and include them on a review section on tests. Another method is “spiral” review: the first, second, and third tests cover all units learned so far; the fourth covers units 2,3 and 4, the fifth covers 3,4 and 5, and so forth, such that the students review each unit three times before dropping the review. These two ideas can be used in tandem – spiral review of more details, and totally cumulative review of the most important knowledge.
Backwards design
A second area of assessment I worked on while at Ma’ayanot concerned defining and communicating clear, measurable goals, and grading on the basis of progress toward those goals. I began to pursue this after I learned about Wiggins and McTighe’s system of “Backward Design.” In brief, they claim that teachers tend to approach testing the wrong way – we first teach, then we design the test based on what we have taught. They suggest that teachers should work backwards – first identify desired results, then define what would serve as evidence of achieving the goals, and only after that to plan the teaching activities which ought to be focused on producing that evidence (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005). After attending conferences and reading further about this idea, I realized that one of my major goals in teaching Gemara was not being assessed at all. On my tests, students defined crucial vocabulary words, answered questions that exhibited their understanding of the Gemara, and considered thought questions that expressed their ability to analyze and apply ideas. However, there was no assessment of whether they had gained the skills to read a new Gemara on their own, which was one of the major stated goals of the class, and the one with which the students identified the most! I therefore added unseen passages with questions as a factor in assessments: The students worked individually in class on 2-3 unseen passages a semester, with dictionaries, so that the students and I could assess their progress toward that goal.
(Another very important goal of my class that I was not assessing was the difficult to define and measure goal of religious growth – of developing a closer connection to God and to the Torah. I struggled with the question of what would qualify as evidence of achieving that goal, and how to measure whether I was achieving it. Grant Wiggins gave me some suggestions in a private communication, but I never came to a real resolution about that. It is a topic worthy of further research and discussion.)
Standards-based grading
The focus on clear goals led me to try another idea called “Standards-based grading” (California Cooperative on Standards Based Grading, n.d.; Scriffiny, 2008; Tyre, 2010). In this system, the teacher identifies the goals of the course, and lists them at the top of columns in the grade book. Instead of writing in a total grade for each test, quiz, and homework assignment, the grade book is organized by the goals – if a quiz hit on goal #2, its score goes in that column; if a test contains evidence of three of the four goals, then a grade goes into each of those columns. See the example below:
| Half-page in grade book dedicated to student: Jane Doe | Vocabulary | Understanding what we learned | Analysis/Application | Unseen |
| Test 1, Oct 4 | 90% | 80% | 50% | |
| Vocab Quiz Oct 28 | 90% | |||
| Unseen Nov 5 | 80% | |||
| Test 2, Nov 23 | 80% | 90% | 67% | |
| Thinking question homework assignment Nov 28 | 85% |
The tremendous advantage of this grading system is the ability to see how the student is progressing toward (or away from) the goals of the course – when a student receives an overall score of 80 on a test, is it because she knew all of the information perfectly but couldn’t analyze or apply it? Or because she didn’t know the vocabulary at all, but can recite the opinions and discuss the concepts brilliantly? Were her answers incomplete across the board? Or perhaps she forgot to answer pieces of several questions? Each of these scenarios requires a different solution.
The teacher can then offer pointers to the students with advice about where she needs to improve and suggest specific learning activities geared to helping her in those areas. A teacher can also easily take improvement into account in each area – instead of seeing general numbers reflecting the sum total of the student’s work, I saw that Jane progressed in analysis and gave her a higher grade based on her achievement by the end. This fits with an analogy that Grant Wiggins (1998) introduced in his Educative Assessment – teaching is like coaching. Wiggins uses the analogy to encourage teachers to offer more helpful feedback as well as focus on authentic tasks, but I believe that I heard him apply it to grading as well: A coach doesn’t take off credit for all the times the player missed the basket during training and practice; the true test is whether by the end, he can make the lay-up and play the game. Another consequence of looking at teaching as coaching was offering immediate feedback, as suggested by Wiggins as well, and I began returning the students’ work within one to two days, instead of one to two weeks. Communicating this notion of the teacher as a coach who offers helpful feedback is a wonderful way to relay to the students that we are not just auditing their performance, but working with them toward goals.
Self-assessment for student growth
As an outgrowth of looking at grades in this way, I designed a self-assessment sheet for the students – each assignment and section of a test was labeled with the goal it works toward, and when I returned the students their work, they filled out how they were doing in each area, so they could see what they needed to work on further. I also had the students devise a list of tips for next time they received a test back, and had them hand me a copy. If the student followed her tips the next time, she received 2 extra points on the next test. The tips included advice such as “review Rabbi Yohanan’s position to clarify my understanding,” as well as “go over my test to make sure I don’t skip parts of the questions.”
Assessment is not really about tests and grading; it’s actually about teaching. I found that using the approaches detailed above created an atmosphere in which students felt we were on the same team. They saw their progress and worked specifically toward their goals; they retained more of what they learned and felt a sense of ownership. When teachers think carefully about how to assess, it forces us to reflect on our teaching goals, whatever they might be, and how to best achieve them.
References
California Cooperative on Standards Based Grading. (n.d.) www.cacollaborative.org/Meetings/Meeting15PostSecondaryAccess/StandardsBasedGradingLiterature.aspx
Scriffiny, P. L. (2008). Seven reasons for standards-based grading. Educational Leadership (66)2. ASCD. Accessed Sep 14, 2010.
www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/oct08/vol66/num02/Seven_Reasons_for_Standards-Based_Grading.aspx
Tyre, P. (2010). A's for good behavior. The New York Times Nov. 27, 2010. Accessed Sep. 14, 2011. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/weekinreview/28tyre.html?pagewanted=1.
Wiggins, G. (1998). Educative Assessment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J (2005). Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.