They're nodding, but are they learning?

You’re full flight in the middle of a lesson, maybe explaining a concept or working through a problem. Press pause. Here, right now, how do you know your students are learning?

Don’t wait until the next assessment task or the final exam. Don’t even wait until you glance through homework (of those who completed it). Right now, is learning taking place?

Why you need to know now

If students aren’t learning, the problem compounds. They’re not going to master the foundations, which will make it more difficult to build and apply additional content. It’s also going to take you time to reteach key content and help these students catch up. 

We want to be proactive in identifying and addressing gaps in student knowledge. And we want to include the whole class in our efforts.

Ineffective strategies to check for understanding

FYI: I’m guilty of using all of these. Here’s some examples:

• Asking broad, whole class questions like, “Does everyone understand?”, “Anyone have questions?”, “Ok to move on?” If I’m met by silence, what does that really show me — that students are clear on things or having problems? I need more detail; I need more info on individual students

• Relying on hands up. I would typically see the same people volunteering answers or asking questions. What about the rest of the class?

• Not regularly checking students’ in-class work. A student looks engaged, but what have they written down? How are they answering the questions — on track, close or way off base?

• Waiting until tests — formal or otherwise. I might be getting crucial info too late.

More effective strategies to check for understanding

For this, I want to highlight low stakes and low effort formative assessment strategies. The kind of things that won’t burden your work load or unduly stress students. 

Here are some of my favourites:

• Adding multiple choice or true/false questions at regular intervals. And asking students to write down their responses first, rather than yelling them out or showing their hands. This gives everyone a chance to answer, and I can glance at responses as I move around the room

• Asking for explanations as to why the incorrect answers were, well, incorrect. I’m using the same multi or T/F questions from the point above, but here I’m asking students to explain why the other answers were wrong. I think the gold standard is for students to explain it to you verbally, but good luck doing this with a whole class on the regular. Instead, you could have students add a line or two of explanation to their notes. And I’d be very clear that stating, “Because it’s wrong” is not a sufficient explanation (modelling can help here)

• Giving students a response to correct. Here, I would create a ‘student’ response with a number of errors in understanding. It would be based on the key content we’d been studying. I ask students to identify the mistakes and then correct them, providing the correct content or connections. This takes a bit more teacher effort, but I do find students love playing the teacher and going hard as a marker

• Asking students to develop their own questions to check on understanding. They’ve done the content — how would they assess if a student understands it? This could be done in pairs or groups, giving you more opportunity to speak with students and see what approach they’re taking. Are they covering off the key elements? Have they caught the key connections? Is there something crucial being missed?

What can you do in your next lesson to check that all students are learning?

Help students add more detail

I recently marked Year 12 half-yearly exams and the two most comment bits of feedback I gave:

• Be specific

• Fully explain your points.

Generally, I find student responses meander. They don’t give concrete details and they only offer superficial explanations. This is frustrating — for students and teachers. For students, because they can’t access higher marks. For teachers, because students could do so much better if they only did some elaboration.

I try and help my students provide more detail and explanation through a particular activity. I’ve named this ‘What works, what doesn’t’.

I make it simple for myself. I take a past exam multiple choice question, such as the one I’ve included below. This comes from the 2017 NSW Economics HSC (Source: NESA).

Then, I paste this onto a doc and create a very simple table that sits below the multi question.

Students then complete the task. They must provide the explanation — the specifics, the details — to clearly articulate why the response is correct or why it is incorrect.

I make it clear to students: if you say, “because it’s the right answer” or “because it’s wrong answer”, that’s insufficient. You’ll be asked to try it again. 

As I circulate in the class, there’s a couple of prompts I’ll use to get students to add to their explanation:

• What makes you say that? (Thanks Project Zero!)

• Why is this the case? 

• What’s the error in logic that’s being made here?

An extra step is having students go through the process verbally. To have them provide their explanations in a conversation with you, rather than writing them down. This is time consuming and it’s not possible to interact with every student in this way. But, when you can do it, I find it very valuable in checking on student understanding and their ability to explain. In detail.

A methodical approach to multis

I think multiple choice questions are an amazing teaching opportunity in economics. 

Think about how tough it is to create a multiple choice question. You need to choose some content, link it to other content or a hypothetical example, make the students think and then include answer options that are similar but still have a clear(ish) winner.

Think also about the value in having students decode and deconstruct multis in a very methodical way to test their content knowledge. I see this as a valuable endeavour.

I’ve created a video (see below) going through all the multis in the 2019 NSW Economics HSC. Check out the exam and marking guide. The video takes you through my process, which I in turn share with my students in class. I am methodical because I want them to be methodical. I want them to take the time now, while they’re practicing, to really interrogate the questions and thoughtfully exclude options, not just identify the correct answer.

Let’s be clear: I don’t expect students to undertake all of this detailed process in their exams. But I do expect students to carry through some of these strategies, particularly some form of annotation. I continually encourage my students to do this all the time, multis, shorts, essays, whatever.

Oh. If you’ve got a better way of answering question 14, let me know in the comments. I didn’t love that one.