Introducing Enhanced Model Student Responses
“Where is the ‘HOW’? Many of my fellow teachers and I understand the need for more rigor and challenging our students to help them achieve. We get it. What is lacking is the ‘how.’ How is teaching with the new standards different from teaching with the old?”
Robert J. Marzano, Ph.D, Leading Educational Researcher
Today, we are excited to share some improvements that we believe will help push the needle of student achievement. Goalbook Pathways’ assessment items have gotten a bit of a makeover with enhanced model student responses. In order to adequately reflect the level of rigor expected from students, we focused on the expression of three components:
- Rigor and critical thinking — by including multiple methods to solve a problem
- Conceptual understanding — by including visual representations of problem-solving
- Justification — by including solutions that model student thinking with evidence
Our hope is that these enhanced model student responses will aid in a standards-based approach to planning and executing quality instruction by helping educators visualize student success at every step of the teaching cycle.
There are many ways to solve problems. Teachers need to help students choose the methods that work for them.
“Unfortunately misinterpretations of the meaning of the word ‘fluency’ in the CCSS are commonplace, and publishers continue to emphasize rote memorization, encouraging the persistence of damaging classroom practices across the United States. Parish defines fluency as ‘knowing how a number can be composed and decomposed and using that information to be flexible and efficient with solving problems.”
Jo Boaler, Ph.D. Professor of Mathematics Education at Stanford University
A student’s success in school and beyond is largely predicated upon their ability to think critically. As our world changes, it isn’t enough for students to simply have content knowledge if they are going to be successful — they need content literacy. Our enhanced model student responses are a result of this shift towards content literacy. Teachers must develop critical thinking skills by moving away from teaching kids how to get the right answer and towards teaching them how to solve problems.
Fig. 3 shows a middle school math example of our enhanced model student responses connected to an algebra assessment item. The equation is 5 + 2x = 2x + 6: giving students a prescribed step-by-step process to solve this problem would likely lead them to the right answer. The question is, are those students developing content literacy in the process? The answer may be yes, but if the focus of instruction becomes more about memorizing steps in a process, then students may not focus on the conceptual aspects of the math, reducing the likelihood that they’ll explore varying problem-solving methods. The good news is our enhanced model student responses serve as a tool to help you build in that variability to your instruction.
How Model Student Responses Fit Within the Teaching Cycle
“[The standards] require more clarity in the progressions of learning being addressed in class. Teachers need to plan for not only what students should understand and be able to do by the end of the learning cycle; they need to scaffold their instruction from facts and details to robust generalizations and processes in order to reach these rigorous standards.”
Robert J. Marzano, Ph.D, Leading Educational Researcher
Every day, teachers are leading their students through a learning process that loosely reflects the teaching cycle in Fig. 2. Our enhanced model student responses can serve as a tool to help them ensure that the cycle yields positive outcomes by informing each part of it.
Our enhanced model student responses help teachers start with the end in mind during the “lesson planning” phase of the teaching cycle. As teachers engage in instruction, knowing that there are multiple methods of solving a problem allows them to be adaptive with the way they respond to students during the lesson. The enhanced MSRs are also valuable for constructing rigorous assessment items because they are comprehensive and define the criteria for success, which makes turning the assessment data around to plan subsequent lessons that much more efficient.
We know student achievement is the result of a ton of really small actions that educators and students take every day. Our hope is that our enhanced model student responses play a small but significant role in a teacher’s actions as they think about the best ways to build content literacy as they plan, instruct, and assess.
Follow the links below to see examples of model student responses. If you aren’t already a Goalbook Pathways user, sign up for a trial.
We have started first with enhancing our model student responses for key math standards from third to eighth grade. Here are some examples:
- I can identify equivalent fractions (4.NF.A.1)
- I can solve a linear equation to identify whether it has one solution or no solution. (8.EE.C.7a)
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References
Marzano, Robert J., and Toth, Michael D. Teaching for Rigor: A Call for a Critical Instructional Shift. West Palm Beach, FL: A Learning Sciences Marzano Center Monograph, 2014. Print http://www.marzanocenter.com/files/Teaching-for-Rigor-20140318.pdf
Boaler, Jo, “Fluency Without Fear: Research Evidence on the Best Ways to Learn Math Facts” Ed. Cathy Williams and Amanda Confer. Youcubed at Stanford University, 2015 www.youcubed.org July 2017 https://www.youcubed.org/evidence/fluency-without-fear/
