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Learning Progressions: Supporting Instruction and Formative Assessment Margaret Heritage Center on Continuous Instructional Improvement Meeting on Advancing Research on Adaptive Instruction and Formative Assessment February 21-22, 2008 Philadelphia, PA Overview • Current descriptions of learning • Learning progressions • A Possible Example • Moving forward Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est la Même Chose “the teaching and learning of structure, rather than the simple mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of the classic problem of transfer…if learning is to render later learning easier, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible” (Bruner, 1960:12) What Pictures of Learning Do Teachers Currently Have? Standards “ …do not describe how students learn in ways that are maximally useful for curriculum and instruction” (NCR, 2001:256). …..and assessment. Scope and Sequence • Specify procedural objectives to be mastered at each grade • Discrete objectives and not connected to each other in a larger network of organizing concepts (NRC, 2000) Units QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture. • Units are often not connected to each other in a coherent vision for the progressive acquisition of concepts and skills QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture. Formative Assessment QuickTime™ and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture. • An ongoing process to close the gap between the learner’s current state and desired goals Features of Formative Assessment • Elicit evidence about student learning • Provide feedback to teachers and students about learning • Use feedback to adjust instruction and learning tactics in real time • Involve students actively in their learning What are Learning Progressions? Masters & Forster (1997:1) “A description of skills, understanding and knowledge in the sequence in which they typically develop: a picture of what it means to ‘improve’ in an area of learning.” Wilson & Bertenthal (2005:3) “Descriptions of successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about an idea that follow one another as students learn: they lay out in words and examples what it means to move toward more expert understanding.” Stevens et al., (2007:2 ) “They represent not only how knowledge and understanding develops, but also predict how knowledge builds over time.” What the Definitions Share • Vertical development over an extended period of time • Learning is envisioned as a development of progressive sophistication in understanding and skills within a domain • No references to grade or age level expectations • Learning is conceived as a sequence or continuum of increasing expertise Examples of Learning Progressions • A Counting and Ordering Process Map, (Masters & Forster, 1997) • The U.K. National Curriculum in History (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2007) • Stages of Listening Comprehension and Speaking Skills (Bailey & Heritage, 2008) • Stages of Spelling (Gillet & Temple, 2000) • A Developmental Model for Learning Functions (Kalchman & Koedinger, 2005) • FAST trajectory (Shavelson, Stanford Educational Assessment Laboratory (SEAL) & Curriculum Research & Development Group, 2005) • A Conceptual Flow for Genetics (DiRanna & Topps, 2005) • Progression of Molecular-Atomic Theory (Smith, Wiser, Anderson & Krajcik, 2006) Progressions Differ In: • The time span of the development of increased sophistication in knowledge, skills and understanding • The level of detail or granularity The U.K. National Curriculum in History (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2007) • Starts at a rudimentary level (e.g., students recognizing the distinction between present and past in their own and other people's lives) • Increasing sophistication to highest level ( e.g., students using factual knowledge and concepts to analyze the relationships between events, people and changes, and between the features of different past societies and cultures) • Levels linked to national system of attainment The U.K. National Curriculum in History (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2007) • A program of study • Links to other domains ( e.g., ICT, Reading, Speaking and Listening) • Profiles of work The U.K. National Curriculum in History (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2007) • Enables teachers to keep the big picture in mind • Connect prior and successive learning to students’ current focus • Enough detail to establish goals • Map formative assessment opportunities onto goals • Know what to teach next QCA, 2007 Constructing Learning Progressions Top-Down • Experts in the domain (e.g., physicists, mathematicians, historians) Ç • Other experts such as development specialists • Domain and research knowledge Bottom-Up • Involves curriculum content experts and teachers Ç • Progression is based on their experience of teaching children • Content knowledge, their views of what is best taught when, and their knowledge of children's learning How To Do It? Research centers could be charged with convening the appropriate experts to produce a synthesis of the best available scientific evidence of how students learn in particular domains of the curriculum" (NRC, “ 2001:256 ). How To Do It? “…findings from cognitive research cannot always be directly translated into classroom practice" (NRC, 2001:258). Research syntheses would need to be couched in ways that are useful for practitioners (NRC,2001). How To Do It? Until there is a sufficiently well developed research base to inform learning progressions in each domain, we need other strategies for figuring out learning progressions (Herman, 2006). Bringing Them Together Structure of disciplinary knowledge Iterative Validation Research Structure of curricular progressions Empirical Verification “Well-tested ideas about learning progressions could provide much needed guidance for both the design of instructional sequences and largescale and classroom-based assessments” (NRC, 2007: 8-6). Research That Helps • Studies on the ways in which student understanding of the big ideas of science develop over time and the ways in which students represent their understanding of these ideas as they develop competence (NRC, 2005) • Rand Reading Study Group (2002) called for more research on reading comprehension Our Students and Teachers Deserve No Less How Margaret Heritage [email protected]