Student Ability and Bias

    I think that all students possess the ability to succeed in any given class. Whether or not a student actually succeeds depends on a variety of factors including motivation, teacher quality, and mindset, among others. Based on my experience, I believe mindset may be the most important factor underlying success. Some students, my past self included, may not think they can succeed because they have a fixed mindset towards a particular subject. Those with a fixed mindset believe that certain traits, such as intelligence, are unchangeable, even through effort.

Those with a growth mindset, on the other hand, believe that anything can be achieved through persistence and determination. They believe that obstacles are learning opportunities, not deterrents. Many students I’ve known have developed negative feelings toward a subject early in their academic careers, which caused them to maintain a fixed mindset for that topic throughout their schooling. Others may have been put off by a specific teacher or class. Regardless, it’s possible for anyone to overcome those doubts and achieve success with the appropriate mindset.

Even though I think that all students are capable of succeeding in any given course, I acknowledge that not all students will best learn and perform the same way. Individual students may have their own preferred learning styles, and students certainly have strengths, weaknesses, and other preferences when it comes to academics. I, for example, preferred the certainty or math and science to the ambiguity of the humanities. That only meant that I had to expend more effort to succeed in English classes. I also strongly preferred individual work and written work to group projects and presentations, but those alternative assessments helped me become the well-rounded, adaptable learner I am today.

Many students with fixed mindsets will struggle in classes they aren’t interested in or had struggled with in the past. In these cases, the teachers of said students have the opportunity to address the issue and find a way to help those students. Perhaps the teacher’s primary teaching style doesn’t match up well with the student’s preferred learning style. Maybe a student isn’t motivated to learn because he or she doesn’t see how they will use the content in the real world. In any case, a variety of instructional and assessment techniques should be used to help all students succeed. Instead of solely using lectures and worksheets to develop content-knowledge, teachers should accommodate all learning styles by using videos, kinesthetic activities, inquiry-based projects, and a balance of individual and group work.

    While students have individual strengths and interests, almost all students should be able to show their learning in the same ways. For better or worse, written tests are an important part of the modern education system, mainly because they are “objective” and assess a large domain of content knowledge effectively. Even though many students dislike taking standardized tests, learning to be a good test taker is an important skill that students need to develop in class. However, teachers should vary their instructional and teaching techniques to accommodate those learners who aren’t as strong at written tests. Performance assessments, for example, can be a great way for students to show off their creativity as they develop collaboration, presentation, and research skills. Varying assessment methods will not only provide each student with a fair opportunity for success, but help students become more well-rounded, flexible learners. Furthermore, using a variety of techniques should minimize the bias present in assessment. By not favoring a particular form of assessment, all students will be on a level playing field for success. To further guard against bias, teachers should work with each other to ensure that their assessments are fair and balanced. Having a second expert evaluate an assessment will certainly help a teacher minimize the bias present in said assessment.

Assessment in Field Experience

    My field experience has provided me with the opportunity to see how assessment is used in a more concrete and practical way. For one class period (about 90 minutes in length) every week for the past dozen weeks or so, I have gone to my local high school to observe and help with a biology class. The classes I have most frequently observed are Honors Biology I classes, but I have also observed a Basic Biology class. The class I most frequently observed last semester had close to 32 students, whereas the class I am currently observing is much smaller, with about 24 students in total.

    Most of the assessments I’ve observed thus far have been informal, formative assessments. In other words, these assessments haven’t always been for grades; rather, they have been done to assess student learning at a given point in time in order to improve instruction going forward. For example, almost every class period starts with a drill question based on previously learned material. The students work on the drill, individually or with those seated near them, at the beginning of class. After a few minutes, the instructor usually directs the students’ attention to the drill problem and discusses it with the class. This warm-up problem serves as a way to review what was learned the previous day, and assess whether or not some review material may be necessary before moving on. If the students seem confident with their answers, the instructor continues with the lesson as planned. If, on the other hand, the students as a whole seem confused or one student raises their hand for clarification, the teacher stops class for a moment to discuss the question. Students are required to write down the drill problems and their answers on a specific sheet that it turned in at the end of each week. This sheet is graded for completion, but the primary purpose of the warm-up activity is to review previously learned material and get students ready for the day.

    Another formative assessment I’ve seen in my field experience is the use of Kahoot quizzes. Kahoot quizzes allow students to participate anonymously via their smartphones or the desktop computers in class. The results are also displayed immediately after each student submits their answer, or the time allotted for the question expires. Because this format provides both the instructor and the students with immediate feedback regarding student performance, the instructor uses Kahoot quizzes to review at the end of a unit and/or before an exam. Students can use their individual results to determine what they know already, and what material they’ll need to study more leading up to the next test. If a particular questions stumped a large portion of the students, however, the teacher took the opportunity to stop class and review that material. For example, I observed a Kahoot quiz in the honors level class after the students learned about mitosis and meiosis. Two questions that the majority of students answered incorrectly referred to how many chromosomes were present in the cell at a certain point during the cell cycle. After noticing how much the students struggled with these questions, the instructor stopped class and took a few minutes to review, clarifying any misconceptions the students had. The Kahoot quizzes may not have been graded, but they were invaluable for the instructor and the students to assess and improve their learning.

    Other assessments I have seen include worksheets, projects, and informal questioning. Some of these have been for grades, but most of them were more important for assessing the learning process. What I’ve learned in our course so far has made me rethink my definition of assessment. I no longer consider it a way to take a “snapshot” of what a student knows at a particular time. I understand that the results of an assessment can also help the students and teacher make adjustments that improve the learning process. Many of these assessments are neither graded nor formal, but they are all quite helpful.

Affective Assessment

    The affective domain refers to attitudes, values, beliefs, interests, and emotions. According to the readings we’ve done for this week, affective assessments are an important, yet often forgotten, part of academic curricula. The importance of the affective domain stems from its connection to student engagement and motivation. Students, after all, are kids, and they can easily lose interest in something if they don’t see the value in it. If students don’t see how a class is relevant to the real-world, they quickly become unmotivated and lose their passion for learning. This could mean the students pay less attention, put less effort into their work, or even drop the course all together. If the course is required for graduation, a disinterested student will simply do the minimum required to pass. As we’ve learned in the past, this kind of performance orientation is far less effective for learning than a mastery orientation is. What’s the point in taking a class if all of the information learned and skills acquired are forgotten after the class ends?

    If affective assessment is that critical to a student’s education, why isn’t it used more often? It seems to me that many teachers don’t know how to properly design and use an affective assessment, consequently leading them to neglect the affective domain and strongly favor the cognitive domain. Perhaps, in this era of high-stakes standardized testing, many teachers feel that focusing on affective assessments is too time-consuming. Even from my limited experience as a teacher and previous experience as a student, I know that covering all the material in the short amount of time given can be difficult, often resulting in teachers rushing through material at the end of the semester and dropping inquiry-based learning projects from the curriculum altogether.

In my opinion, this is unacceptable. The readings we’ve studied this week make it clear that the affective domain is as important as the cognitive domain. After all, students who aren’t motivated to learn and don’t value the curriculum will not put forth the effort necessary to succeed. It also seems that affective assessments are quicker and easier to implement than one might initially suspect. Most of the affective assessments I’ve looked at have fewer than twenty items, and they can easily be included in formative assessments such as Kahoot quizzes to provide the instructor with anonymous results.

In my future classrooms, I envision myself using affective assessments alongside cognitive ones to monitor the student learning process. For example, I could use a diagnostic assessment to not only assess prior knowledge, but to determine if students understand the importance of a particular unit. If students seem to understand the real-world relevance of a unit, it might not be necessary to spend extra time explicitly stating that relevance. If however, the students don’t value a unit such as ecology, I could take the time to help them see it’s importance using examples of conservation biology or climate change. I could then use inquiry-based research projects to help students become more interested in a topic by giving them more control over their learning. I would continue to track these affective variables using formative assessments, including Kahoot quizzes.  Not all assessments need to be that formal. Informal discussions with students can tell you a lot about their disposition. If a teacher’s job is truly to guide students along the learning process, monitoring and evaluating the affective domain is of critical importance, even if it’s not for a grade.

Action Research Brainstorm

    Looking back on my time as a student learning biology, I would say the most difficult content areas for me were diversity of life and genetics. Learning genetics for the first time was confusing primarily because genetics involves a lot of probability, and I didn’t have a proper probability and statistics course until after I had taken biology in high school. My limited understanding of probability therefore made pedigrees and dihybrid crosses a bit more challenging than they needed to be.

Diversity of life, on the other hand, is a unit that gave me much more trouble, and for entirely different reasons. Part of the reason I struggled with diversity of life is the sheer amount of memorization involved. This particular unit includes learning the various ways we classify species, the anatomical features that differentiate those species, and how closely related those species are evolutionarily. Memorizing the features that differentiate groups of organisms was difficult for me because I had very little prior knowledge in that area. Not only was I unaware of my everyday exposure to protists, fungi, and prokaryotes, I didn’t cover life diversity in elementary school or middle school to the same degree as ecology, cell biology, molecular biology, and human anatomy and physiology. Outside of some very basic animal and plant biology, I didn’t cover life diversity in depth until high school and college.

    When learning about diversity of life, my teachers typically introduced the oldest species first, bacteria and archaea, and progressed through different species or groups based on the major evolutionary advances that arose. For example, one of the first innovations that separated green algae from the first plants that penetrated land was the development of the cuticle, which allowed plants to retain water. Vascular tissue evolved later as a means for plants to distribute water without needing to be bathed in it, further removing vascular plants from algae and bryophytes. While this is a logical approach to differentiating species and learning about the evolution of modern organisms, there is a lot of information to learn, and evolution does not always follow a logical path. Analogous structures, ancestral similarities, and polyphyletic grouping can make species classification a nightmare for any student. If the information to be learned is simply presented as a list of facts, students will likely not be engaged or interested in the material. In my field experience, I have seen students struggle with mitosis and meiosis initially, but they learned best when they were able to create diagrams and role-play as chromosomes during a kinesthetic activity. Engaging students by having them create things could potentially improve student learning in the diversity of life unit as well.

    Based on what I’ve learned thus far in the MAT program and seen in my field experience, I think engaging students by creating models and/or working in small groups would be really beneficial for difficult topics such as life diversity. I have personally found that a great way to test your knowledge about a topic is to try to teach someone else about that topic. Therefore, I could have students research a particular group of organisms and create their own timelines, tables, and Venn diagrams to present to the class. Memorizing a list of features that differentiate, for example, mammals from reptiles and amphibians, can be a daunting task, but having students take information they research, using the textbook and myself as a guide, and organize that information into a table or timeline can be a useful way for them to apply their knowledge to create something. For example, when learning about invertebrate species, I could assign a different phyla to each group of students. The groups would research their phylum, and present what they’ve learned to the class. They could use a Venn diagram comparing roundworms, flatworms, and annelids, or a timeline showing how the evolution of triploblasty and bilateral symmetry make sponges the simplest animals. Another useful component of this approach would involve having students generate their own questions and quiz each other on some of the important differences to be studied using flashcards. Having students take control of their own learning, and even participate in the creation of assessments, would combat the monotony and dullness that can accompany a unit that involves lots of fact memorization, such as diversity of life.

Assessment Types

In my educational experience, I thought a well-balanced summative exam including selected response items, constructed response items, and essays allowed me to best demonstrate my learning. I preferred short answer questions and essays to most selected response questions, because more open-ended questions allotted me the freedom to impress the teacher with my knowledge. If I had memorized a plethora of facts or a complex reaction mechanism, I loved having the opportunity to show off that knowledge and my creativity with a written response. These items take a long time to complete and grade, however, so I was always appreciate of tests that included many selected response items as well. For someone like me, who studies way more than is necessary to do well, I thought a large number of selected response questions was a great way to provide the teacher with a snapshot of everything I’d learned in a short amount of time. Most of my teachers in school used tests similar to this format. There would often be a scantron portion that made up the majority of the questions, followed by a worksheet with short answer questions and an essay or two. I never minded long written exams, because they provided me with the best chance to get a good grade, and I considered the grading to be relatively objective compared to a performance assessment.

As a student, my least favorite assessments were performance assessments such as papers, projects, and presentations. The initial reason for this was my shyness. I was never a student who wanted to give a presentation or performance in front of the class, so being able to take a test quietly instead of deliver a PowerPoint lecture was a no-brainer in favor of the former. Furthermore, working on a project or paper typically involves hours of time spent outside of class working on the assignment. I would’ve much rather used class time to complete a test than take away some of my precious free time. I also preferred exams because, as mentioned previously, I thought they provided the teacher with a better representation of what I had learned and achieved. Papers and projects are usually focused on a very specific topic. An exam covers many topics in varying levels of detail, however, so I considered them more valid and objective for grading purposes.

My views on assessment have changed considerably throughout the course of my academic career. In my future classrooms, I hope to use a variety of assessment techniques in order to best measure and improve student learning. I still think exams that use a balance of selected response, constructed response, and essay questions are the best way to measure fact-based knowledge, but our studies of assessment have taught me that other forms of assessment may be better for skill development. For example, using lab practicals can be extremely useful for evaluating real-world lab techniques. Additionally, as much as I detested group projects, research papers, and presentations, those assignments helped me develop skills that have been important to my success in college and professionally. I no longer get as nervous during presentations, and am extremely comfortable doing research for a paper. Using a balance of these various assessment types will ideally provide me with the best possible measure of student learning, and help my students become well-rounded and flexible professionals.