KARCHER STAFF BLOG
Karcher 2016-2017 School Calendar
Student's of the week for
November 7 - November 11
- Connor Schmaling: (Onyx)
- Connor is always polite and helpful. His peers have come to count on him for help with their chrome books. Connor is an excellent example of what it means to live each day the Karcher Way.
- Charley Bunker: (Applied Academics)
- Charley has stepped up as a leader in her Spanish class this year. She i always pleasant, positive and kind!
- Emily Rausch: ( Silver House)
- Emily is always willing to share her opinions and ideas and is always respectful of the opinions and ideas of others. Her intellectual perspective raises the level of discussion in the classroom.
- Lucas Wittkamp: (Karcher Character Bucks)
- Lucas has a great sense of humor and always add an interesting slant to our discussions in class!
- Robert Pike: (Hive)
- Robert is the Hive student of the week. Since joining us from Lake Geneva, he has settled in to be a responsible and respectful Karcher student who is always volunteering in class.
- Ty Sagedal: (Diamond)
- Ty is quiet leader who is always kind to his peers. Ty is an outstanding example to the Karcher Way.
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Kudos
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- Sue Bekken was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK! Congrats Sue and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits.
- Kudos to Brad Ferstenou and Katherine Bostford along with all 7th grade staff that attended the field museum trip to Chicago. I heard great things!!! Thank you for all of your behind the scenes work setting up the trip and then having to set it up again due to the date change. Your time and effort to provide students with experiences outside the walls of our building is appreciated!
- Thank you teaching staff for your efforts and work on Wednesday at our building level inservice. Your professionalism, collaboration, and efforts are truly appreciated as we work to infuse essential skills into our classrooms.
- Kudos to our wrestling team for taking first place in their tournament this weekend at Franklin!!!
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Reminders
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- Monday, November 14 - Math Workshop training in the 21st Century Lab. All of our math teachers along with Dyer's math teachers will be exploring and gaining knowledge behind math workshop.
- Monday, November 14 - BLT Meeting @ 2:40 in the conference room.
- Main focus will be on student led conferences and adjustments we can make to keep it innovative and fresh for students and families.
- Tuesday, November 15 - Leadership Conference field trip for some of our student council and leadership team students.
- Any questions contact Marilee Hoffman or Stephanie Rummler.
- Wednesday, November 16 - Literacy PLC in the library @ 2:40
- Teachers - please add your name to the "Google Doc Literacy PLC" found on the Karcher Calendar prior to Wednesday's PLC.
- You will start in your content area groups and reflect on the prior literacy strategies you utilized in your classrooms.
- Then you will get into your Google Doc groups to collaborate about your upcoming literacy infusion wishing common strategy groups.
- Thursday, November 17 - Staff Meeting in the library @ 2:40. This is for ALL STAFF - we will be done by 3:00.
- Friday, November 18 - The last day of iTime rotation 2!
Parent/Teacher Conferences on December 5 from 4:00 - 6:00
- Teachers... please utilize this Google Document to begin calling and scheduling conferences with your students.
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Pictures from the week
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Getting ready to head into the auditorium...
7th grade field trip to the Field Museum! Had a great time!
Article of the week: Continuation of last week's article...
How to Assess Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Your Classroom
What Is the Effect of Assessing Thinking Skills?
When you teach and assess higher-order thinking regularly, over time you should see benefits to your students. Your understanding of how your students are thinking and processing what they are learning should improve as you use assessments specifically designed to show students' thinking. Ultimately, their thinking skills should improve, and so should their overall performance. Students learn by constructing meaning, incorporating new content into their existing mental representations; therefore, improving thinking skills should actually improve content knowledge and understanding as well. How large can we expect this effect to be?
Higgins, Hall, Baumfield, and Moseley (2005) did a meta-analysis of studies of thinking-skills interventions on student cognition, achievement, and attitudes. A meta-analysis is a quantitative synthesis of studies that reports effect sizes, or amount of change in standard-deviation units. Standardizing the effects from different studies means researchers can average effect sizes across studies, which yields a more stable estimate of the size of an effect—in this case, the effect of thinking-skills interventions—than any one study alone could provide. For their review, Higgins and his colleagues defined thinking-skills interventions as "approaches or programmes which identify for learners translatable mental processes and/or which require learners to plan, describe, and evaluate their thinking and learning" (p. 7).
Higgins and his colleagues found 29 studies, from all over the world but mostly from the United States and the United Kingdom, that were published in English and that reported enough data to calculate effect sizes. Nine of the studies were conducted in primary schools and 20 in secondary schools; most were in the curriculum areas of literacy (7 studies), mathematics (9 studies), and science (9 studies). Their purpose in doing the meta-analysis was to estimate the size of effects of teaching and assessing thinking skills, and they found very strong effects. The average effect of thinking-skills instruction was as follows:
- 0.62 on cognitive outcomes (for example, verbal and nonverbal reasoning tests), over 29 studies.
- 0.62 on achievement of curricular outcomes (for example, reading, math, or science tests), over 19 studies.
- 1.44 on affective outcomes (attitudes and motivation), over 6 studies.
Because of the small number of effect sizes of motivational outcomes, the average effect size estimate of 1.44 may be less reliable than the other two effect sizes. But even 0.62 is a large effect for an educational intervention, equivalent to moving an "average" class of students from the 50th percentile to the 73rd percentile on a standardized measure.
Overall, then, Higgins and colleagues' meta-analysis supports the conclusion that thinking-skills interventions are effective in supporting student improvement in thinking, content area achievement, and motivation. In the next sections I describe some specific studies from the United States that support this conclusion. The studies described only scratch the surface of research in this area, and I encourage readers who are interested to look up additional works.
Assessing Higher-Order Thinking Increases Student Achievement
Using assignments and assessments that require intellectual work and critical thinking is associated with increased student achievement. These increases have been shown on a variety of achievement outcomes, including standardized test scores, classroom grades, and research instruments, as the studies described here illustrate. These increases have been demonstrated in reading, mathematics, science, and social studies. And they have been documented particularly for low-achieving students.
Evidence from NAEP and TIMSS. Wenglinsky (2004) reviewed studies of the relationships between student performance on large-scale measures and instruction emphasizing higher-order thinking, projects, and multiple-solution problems. He reported clear evidence from both the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) that, in mathematics and science, instruction emphasizing reasoning was associated with higher scores in all grade levels tested. In reading, teaching for meaning (including thinking about main ideas, author's purpose, and theme, and using real texts) was associated with higher NAEP performance as well, although Wenglinsky reminds his readers that NAEP testing begins in 4th grade, so it does not shed light on approaches to teaching beginning reading. In civics, 4th graders who studied basic information about how government works performed better on NAEP, but by 8th grade, students whose instruction also included active involvement and thinking did better.
Evidence from an urban district. Newmann, Bryk, and Nagaoka (2001) studied the mathematics and writing assignments of Chicago teachers in grades 3, 6, and 8. Students who received assignments requiring "authentic intellectual work" (p. 2) made greater-than-average gains in reading and mathematics on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS), and in reading, mathematics, and writing on the Illinois Goals Assessment Program (IGAP). As the name suggests, the ITBS is a basic skills test. The IGAP was the state test in place in Illinois at the time of the study.
To do their study, Newmann, Bryk, and Nagaoka had to define what they meant by "authentic intellectual work." They contrasted two kinds of instruction: didactic and interactive. By "didactic" instruction, they meant the kind of instruction in which students learn facts, algorithms, definitions, and such. In didactic instruction, students are tested with "right-answer," recall-level questions or with problems that require application or problem solving just like what was done in class.
However, in "interactive" instruction, "students are often asked to formulate problems, to organize their knowledge and experiences in new ways to solve them, to test their ideas with other students, and to express themselves using elaborated statements, both orally and in writing" (Newmann et al., 2001, pp. 10–11). Readers will hear in this definition the kind of higher-order thinking discussed in this book. In this kind of instruction, students are assessed with nonroutine application of knowledge and skills. The researchers defined "authentic intellectual work" as requiring "construction of knowledge, through the use of disciplined inquiry, to produce discourse, products, or performances that have value beyond school" (p. 14). This kind of work was associated with one-year learning gains on the ITBS that were 20 percent greater than the national average. On the IGAP, students from classes that did this kind of work performed about half a standard deviation above students from classes whose work was very didactic. Students with both high and low prior achievement benefited.
Evidence for disadvantaged students. Pogrow (2005) designed the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) program specifically for educationally disadvantaged students, both Title I students and students with learning disabilities. The program specifically works on four kinds of thinking skills: (1) metacognition, or the ability to think about thinking; (2) making inferences; (3) transfer, or generalizing ideas across contexts; and (4) synthesizing information. In its 25-year history, the HOTS program has produced gains on nationally normed standardized tests, on state tests, on measures of metacognition, in writing, in problem solving, and in grade point average.
Two things make these results for the HOTS program particularly impressive. For one, in several of the evaluations, teaching thinking skills has been contrasted with enhanced content instruction. The thinking-skills instruction did a much better job of setting up the students to be flexible, allowing them to "understand understanding" (p. 70) and to handle all sorts of different content. For another, these results hold for about 80 percent of students who have been identified as Title I or learning disabled students, as long as they have a verbal IQ of 80 or above. It takes time, though. Pogrow (2005) reports that with these students, "It takes about four months before students will give a reason for a response without being asked, and it takes about six months before they will disconfirm a prior answer" (p. 71). But they do!
Assessing Higher-Order Thinking Increases Student Motivation
Studies have shown that holding students accountable for higher-order thinking by using assignments and assessments that require intellectual work and critical thinking increases student motivation as well as achievement. Students do not become engaged with their studies in the abstract, nor do they become motivated in the abstract. Rather, they become engaged in thinkingabout particular things and motivated to learn particular things. Higher-order thinking increases students' sense of control over ideas. Thinking is much more fun than memorizing.
A study of 3rd grade language arts. Meece and Miller (1999) studied elementary students' goal orientations (interest in mastery and interest in performing well), perceived competence, and strategy use in reading and writing. During the research project, some of the 3rd grade teachers expressed concern that their students showed mastery of skills and strategies on reading and writing tests but did not transfer those skills to actual reading and writing beyond the tests. Meece and Miller evaluated the 3rd grade assignments and found that most of them focused on individual skills, recall, and teacher control. Many assignments required one-word answers, for example. Meece and Miller helped teachers learn to devise assignments that required students to read extended material, write more than one paragraph, and collaborate with classmates. Students in classes where teachers gave these kinds of assignments regularly declined in their performance-goal orientation (meaning they were less inclined to want to do assignments for the sake of gaining the approval of others).
More interesting, work-avoidance scores of low-achieving students in these classes (from student questionnaires about schoolwork) decreased, whereas work-avoidance scores of low achievers in the regular classes stayed the same. This finding may seem like a conundrum. Arguably, work that required more reading and writing could have been more, not less, off-putting, especially to low achievers. But the opposite was the case. Low-achieving students were more motivated to do the thoughtful work than the one-word-answer drill work.
A study of 5th grade social studies. In a much smaller-scale study—but one very similar to something you could do in your own classroom—Carroll and Leander (2001) were concerned that their own 5th grade social studies students lacked interest in the topic and that many perceived it as difficult and not fun. Their master's thesis reported on a 14-week project to teach students learning strategies designed to improve higher-order thinking. They also instituted cooperative learning to allow students to think together.
Observations before the program suggested the average student was off-task during class about 20 percent of the time and inactive about 10 percent of the time. In a survey, less than half (47 percent) agreed that they were excited about learning, and less than half (47 percent) agreed that social studies assignments were easy. After a 14-week program that included teaching students questioning strategies, using graphic organizers, cooperative-learning research projects, and portfolio construction, the measures were repeated. This time, observations suggested the average student was off-task during class only about 10 percent of the time and inactive about 8 percent of the time. In the survey, 95 percent agreed that they were excited about learning, and 89 percent agreed that social studies assignments were easy. Students' grades on chapter-comprehension assignments improved as well.
A study of teacher and student perceptions of learner-centered practices. Meece (2003) reported on a study of 109 middle school teachers and 2,200 middle school students in urban, suburban, and rural communities. Both teachers and students completed surveys to assess the use of learner-centered teaching practices that stress higher-order thinking. For teachers, the only ratings correlated with student motivation and achievement were related to teachers' reported support for higher-order thinking. For students, ratings on all the learner-centered practice dimensions (including practices supporting higher-order thinking) were correlated with motivation and achievement. Higher-order thinking practices were the only practices found to be related to motivation from both teachers' and students' perspectives.
