Chapter 8, page 176
information from the assessment to revise her own instruction so that it will be better the next time. The
assessment also provides feedback to students, and it can be used to provide information to the entire
school to help teachers and principals in general understand how students are doing.
Instructional Goals
Instructional goals are important for two reasons:
- When teachers develop clear instructional goals, it helps them decide what to assess and what to
focus on in class activities. (This is the instructional cycle again.) When the teacher formulates clear
instructional goals, it makes it more likely that the teacher will focus instruction and assessment on what is
most important. - When teachers develop clear instructional objectives and communicate these objectives to students,
students show greater achievement. In part, this is because the objectives help the teachers structure and
focus their instruction. In part it is because objectives help students understand what to focus on as they
participate in class and study at home.
A large body of research evidence shows that when students know the objectives, achievement scores
are better. Presenting objectives helps average students most of all.
As one example of such research, researchers have compared mathematics classes in elementary
schools in Japan and the U.S. Here is a summary of the findings:
Table 8.1: Summary of findings in Japan and the U.S. Mathematics classes
(^) Teacher statement of
goals
Students understanding of
goals
Student achievement
U.S. classes Teachers were not clear
about the goals of the
lesson.
In interviews, students
showed that they did not
know what principles they
were supposed to learn during
the lesson.
Lower mastery of the
lesson content.
Japanese
classes
Teachers made goals of
the lesson clear.
In interviews, students
showed that they knew
exactly what the point of the
lesson was.
Higher mastery of the
lesson content.
ASSESSING UNDERSTANDING
What does it mean to understand something? And how would you test whether someone understands
something? The purpose of this chapter is to give you some powerful answers to these questions.
Here’s an initial but useful definition of understanding. You understand an idea when you can use that
idea to answer novel questions and solve novel problems. These novel questions and novel problems should
require students to use the information to make new inferences.
Many questions used by teachers are not novel questions, and students do not have to understand the
material to answer these questions. You have seen some examples of some of these questions in class.
Here is another example: