Cooperative+Learning+and+Accurate+Assessment

Teaching with Technology: Cooperative Learning and Accurate Assessment Hello Benavidez Technology Community Members!

This week we will look at cooperative learning, from “Using Technology with Classroom Instruction and accurate assessment from “Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning, Chapter 7, Using UDL to Accurately Assess Student Progress.” These two topics will be very thought provoking and will hopefully encourage you to change the way that you look at cooperative groups in the classroom and how we assess student learning.

According to Pitler, “cooperative learning focuses on having students interact with each other in groups in ways that enhance their learning. When students work in cooperative groups, they make sense of, or construct meaning for, new knowledge by interacting with others.” We have all been in situations where we did not understand a concept and a peer made the concept comprehensible to us. As members of professional learning communities, we are all learning and planning cooperatively and collaboratively on a weekly basis.

When our students graduate, they must be prepared to thrive in a “fast-paced, virtual workplace,” and will “need to be able to learn and produce cooperatively.” As educators, we must provide them with opportunities to create and produce products collaboratively. Technology is the ideal medium for this endeavor, as its utilization will simulate real world scenarios that the students may encounter later in life and provide invaluable hands on experiences that will not be easily forgotten. Pitler recommends “the use of a variety of criteria to group students; the use of informal, formal and base groups; that groups be kept to a manageable size; and that cooperative learning be combined with other classroom structures.”

Assessment is a fact of our educational lives. We must assess student mastery. If students do not demonstrate mastery in a content area it could be because of several reasons: the instruction may be inadequate, students may not be applying themselves or, the assessment tool may be inconsistent with the manner of instruction.

Last week, we looked at UDL and the ways that UDL strives to differentiate learning to individualize learning for all students. This week we will explore ways that UDL endeavors to differentiate assessment in order to accurately assess student learning.

All of us strive to meet the varying learning needs of our students by use of multiple intelligences and varying learning styles. But, how many of us take those individual differences into consideration when we are assessing our students? We allow many of our students to use varying types of learning accommodations during instruction, guided and independent practice. But, do we allow those accommodations during assessment? The answer is most often no. In these instances, we are often setting our students up to fail. To ensure student success, UDL suggests that we employ the following assessment strategies: ** Flexibility in Presentation: ** Since the students were instructed with various representations of content, it should follow that they should be assessed with various representations of content.
 * Flexibility in Expression and Strategic Supports ** : If during project based learning activities and formative assessments students were allowed to demonstrate mastery in different ways and used strategic academic supports, they should also be permitted to use varying ways of demonstration and the supports during summative assessments.
 * Flexibility in Engagement: **  Test stress and anxiety is a serious issue for most students. Many students become so anxious that they cannot perform well on tests. For this reason, assessment should be “embedded into ongoing work.”

I’m sure that many of us can remember cramming for a test, take the test and then days later not being able to remember what we studied or what was on the test. On the other hand, I’m sure that many of us can vividly remember specific details of hands on experiences and activities that we participated in. Accurate assessment involves giving each student an opportunity to express knowledge in the way that is most appropriate for the student.

Resources: “Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works” Howard Pitler, Elizabeth Hubblell, Matt Kuhn and Kim Malenoski Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning David H. Rose & Anne Meyer www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent