Page 329 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 14 What Is the Research Base That Informs Powerful Social Studies Teaching? 301
will assume responsibility for studying the person’s early life, another for the person’s major accomplishments, another for the effects of these on society, and so on).
Cooperative learning in pairs or small groups should be viewed as a supplement to, not a substitute for, clarification of key concepts and principles in whole-class lessons. If students are asked to assume too much of the responsibility for managing their learn- ing while operating independently of the teacher, they may fail to develop key ideas or develop distorted versions of them. Also, if students are asked to divide responsibilities so that each works on a separate part of a larger task, many of them may never develop a coherent grasp of the big picture.
Cooperative learning methods are most likely to enhance learning if they combine group goals with individual accountability. That is, each group member has clear objec- tives for which he or she will be held accountable. (Students know that any member of the group may be called on to answer any one of the group’s questions or that they all will be tested individually on what they are learning.)
Activities used in cooperative learning formats should be well suited to those formats. Some activities are most naturally done by individuals working alone, others by students working in pairs, and still others by small groups of three to six students.
Students should receive whatever instruction and scaffolding they may need to prepare them for productive engagement in cooperative learning activities. For example, teachers may need to show their students how to share, listen, integrate the ideas of others, and handle disagreements constructively. During times when students are working in pairs or small groups, the teacher should circulate to monitor progress, make sure that groups are working productively on the assigned tasks, and provide any needed assistance.
11. Goal-Oriented Assessment The teacher uses a variety of formal and informal assessment methods to monitor progress toward learning goals.
Research findings. Well-developed curricula include strong and functional assessment components. These assessment components are aligned with the curriculum’s major pur- poses and goals, so they are integrated with the curriculum’s content, instructional meth- ods, and learning activities, and are designed to evaluate progress toward major intended outcomes.
Comprehensive assessment does not just document students’ abilities to supply acceptable answers to questions or problems; it also examines the students’ reasoning and problem-solving processes. Effective teachers routinely monitor their students’ prog- ress in this fashion, using both formal tests or performance evaluations and informal assessment of students’ contributions to lessons and work on assignments (Dempster, 1991; Stiggins, 1997; Wiggins, 1993).
In the classroom. Effective teachers use assessment for evaluating students’ progress in learning and for planning curriculum improvements, not just for generating grades. Good assessment includes data from many sources besides paper-and-pencil tests. Its forms and content address the full range of goals or intended outcomes (knowledge and skills at a variety of levels, attitudes, values, and dispositions). Standardized, norm-referenced tests might comprise part of the assessment program. These tests are useful to the extent that what they measure is congruent with the intended outcomes of the curriculum and attention is paid to students’ performance on each individual item, not just total scores. However, standardized tests ordinarily should be supplemented with publisher-supplied curriculum embedded tests (when these appear useful) and with teacher-made tests that focus on learning goals emphasized in instruction but not in external testing sources.
In addition, learning activities and sources of data other than tests should be used for assessment purposes. Everyday lessons and activities provide opportunities to monitor the progress of the class as a whole and of individual students, and tests can be augmented
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