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Thoughts on Learning Targets
By Charlie | February 22, 2008
One of the core competencies of classroom assessment is the presence of clearly defined, understood, and articulated learning targets. If a learning target is not clearly defined we will have the teacher instructing in a quite unfocused manner as well as the student aiming at an unclear target. If it is clearly defined, it is of little value if either the teacher or the student does not have a good understanding of the target in the sense of “I know what quality looks like in this target”. Finally if the target is clearly defined and understood, both the teacher and the student should be able to articulate in user friendly language a good description of the learning target. If a learning target comes up short on any of these three items (clearly defined, understood, and articulated), the benefit it contributes to student learning is greatly reduced.
Speaking of benefit of established and posted learning targets, the research on this topics indicates when done well and in the proper timeframe, just simply using and posting learning targets results in somewhere around a 20 percentile point gain in student performance.
This is an easy component of quality classroom assessment to implement and brings almost immediate benefit to both the teacher and the students. However, there are a number of ways that learning targets can be used in the classroom. I would appreciate you sharing your thoughts and experiences in the use of learning targets in classroom assessment.
Topics: Learning Targets |
March 1st, 2008 at 2:30 am
I’ve been doing some reading on Assessment for Learning approaches, and am very interested in your comment about the research, and the 20 percentile point gain in student performance. Can you provide a specific reference?
March 2nd, 2008 at 10:08 am
Thanks for the comment. The studies I reference in this are three synthesis studies. One was Walberg,(1999) who did a synthesis of 21 studies with an effect size of 0.40 and a percentile gain of 16. Lipsey & Wilson (1993) was a synthesis of 204 studies, effect size of 0.55 and percentile gain of 21. Finally, Wise &Okey (1983) did two separate synthesis. One of 25 studies, effectize of 0.48 and 18 percenitle gain. The other, which I discounted because of the small number of studies and the outlier results was 3 studies, 1.37 effect size and a huge 41 percentile gain. I took liberty to take the 16 21, and 18 percentile gains and grouped them to “somewhere around 20″.
These studies deal with setting “learning objectives” and “learning goals”, whereas I prefer the term “learning targets” in reference to the objective or goal of learning in a particular lesson or unit.