Checking for Understanding
Checking for understanding is made up of at least three instructional practices that formulate high engaging strategies that support the formative assessment process. These three instructional practices include, using questioning to check for understanding, providing meaningful feedback, and reinforcing effort by reframing of conceptual awareness on specific learning goals. What is known about checking for students' understanding of important ideas and concepts helps instructors gauge what students are getting from a lesson and what they need to work on more. Both are important in the meta-cognitive process, knowing what students know and providing intervention at the point when there is a disconnect to conceptualization. This is when providing useful feedback becomes the corner stone for the exactness of knowledge that challenges new ideas to form correctly while leading the learner to extract prior knowledge to conceptualize new learning.
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Reflective ThinkingThis process of extracting prior knowledge to form new knowledge is based on the idea of constructivism. To view the learner as a constructor of information is to support learning in a way that allows them to create their own subjective representation of objective reality. In teaching we can construct this process through a formative assessment process known as checking for understanding, using prior knowledge as a background of inducing reflective thinking.
It is well known factor that when instructors check for understanding they feel more connected to their students' learning and have a better sense of what to expect from their students' in terms of assessment. To fully put into practice the required elements to ensure student understanding there are three main instructional strategies that must exist. |
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Feedback
"Just recently professor John Hattie found that feedback has more effect on achievement than any other factor. He concluded that formative assessment has a huge effect on learning quality. It has been found to add the equivalent of two grades to students' achievement if done very well. Hattie has made clear that ‘feedback' includes telling students what they have done well (positive reinforcement), and what they need to do to improve (corrective work, targets etc), but it also includes clarifying goals. This means that giving students assessment criteria for example would be included in ‘feedback'. Hattie believes that students can get feedback on the processes they have used to complete the task, and on their ability to self-regulate their own learning. All these have the capacity to increase achievement. Feedback on the ‘self' such as ‘well done you are good at this' is not helpful. The feedback must be informative rather than evaluative."
- Achievement is enhanced to the degree that students and teachers set and communicate appropriate, specific and challenging goals
- Achievement is enhanced as a function of feedback, using questioning of formative assessment
- Increases in student learning involves not only surface and deep learning but also a reframing conceptual awareness through meta-cognitive principles in teaching.
John Hattie on Visible Learning
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