Recall Knowledge: Assessment: II

An objective for Recall Knowledge may refer to both verbal and visual information. Here is an objective, target information and assessment task that consists of 13 written words and visual images consisting of a map of Canada.
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OBJECTIVE
Recall Knowledge: Know the names and locations of the provinces and territories of Canada.
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TARGET INFORMATION FOR OBJECTIVE

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ASSESSMENT TASK FOR OBJECTIVE

DIRECTIONS: Write the name of each place on the map in the space beside the number
1. __________ 2. __________ 3. __________ 4. __________
5. __________ 6. __________ 7. __________ 8. __________
9. __________ 10.__________ 11. __________12.__________
13._________
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The assessment task requires students to retrieve from their long-term memories the names of the provinces and territories, and their spelling. If the teacher does not consider it important for students to be able to spell those names then the assessment task might consist of names written with a line beside each for students to write the number on the map for each place.

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Students' completion of the assessment task provides an explicit manifestation of their implicit cognitive process of retrieving the target information from long-term memory. Instruction is initiated if students are unable to perform the assessment task adequately. Instruction will end when they are able to perform the assessment task adequately.

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Here is another example of the target information and assessment task for a Recall-Knowledge objective that consists of both verbal and visual information. The verbal information consists of a written definition of a simple electric circuit and names of its parts. The visual information consists of a diagram of a simple electric circuit.

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OBJECTIVE
Recall Knowledge: Know the definition of a simple electric circuit, and be able to draw an example of one.

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TARGET INFORMATION FOR OBJECTIVE

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ASSESSMENT TASK FOR OBJECTIVE

DIRECTIONS: Answer these questions.

1. What is a simple electric circuit?
2. Draw an example of a simple electric circuit, and label the parts of the circuit.

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Students should answer the first question by writing something like the written description of a circuit given in the target information. They should follow the second direction by drawing something like the drawing given in the target information, although it may show a different power source and load.

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Students' completion of the assessment task provides an explicit manifestation of their implicit cognitive process of retrieving the target information from long-term memory. Instruction for the objective will be initiated if students are unable to perform the assessment task adequately. Instruction for the objective will end when students are able to perform the assessment task adequately.

Recall-Knowledge Objectives

Teachers can categorize an objective as Recall Knowledge if they consider that students demonstrate mastery of the objective when they are able to retrieve from their long-term memories the specific information (we will call it target information) that is appropriate for the objective, and to retrieve it without any assistance from the teacher, from other students, or from any other source. Target information is usually verbal, visual, or verbal and visual.

Here are examples of objectives that can be categorized as Recall Knowledge because they, more or less, identify or suggest the target information that students should be able to retrieve from their long-term memories.

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POSSIBLE RECALL-KNOWLEDGE OBJECTIVES

Language

1. Be able to spell the words in Lesson 21.

2. Know that the verb move in the sentence Green lizards move across the sidewalk, is less descriptive than the verbs creep, crawl, scurry or slink.

Mathematics

1. Have memorized the basic addition facts.

2. Be able to define the term hypotenuse.

3. Describe the steps in converting fractions into percentages.

Science

1. Explain the spiders have eight legs and insects have six legs.

2. Know the speeds of light and sound.

3. Be able to point out on a model of a frog the names of the major internal parts, and to describe the function of each.

Social Studies

1. Be able to name the three branches of the federal government in the United States, and to explain the power and responsibility of each.

2. Name the countries of Europe and show their locations on a blank, outline map of Europe.

3. Describe the major natural resources found in Canada.

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Unfortunately, many of the objectives that are given in curriculum guides, textbooks, and even performance standards are worded so ambiguously that it is not clear to which category of instructional practice they should be assigned. For example, this objective appears in a social studies text for the sixth grade. Does it refer to Recall Knowledge or to Application Knowledge?

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RECALL-KNOWLEDGE OBJECTIVE

Students should understand that capital, adequate institutions, such as corporations, and skilled labor force, and trained managers, are necessary in the building of a successful industrial nation.

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If the objective is categorized as Recall Knowledge, then this would appear to be the target information that students should be able to retrieve from their long-term memories.

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TARGET INFORMATION FOR THE OBJECTIVE

The four things that are necessary in the building of a successful industrial nation are: (1) capital, (2) adequate corporations, (3) adequately skilled labor fource, and (4) adequately trained managers.

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And if the objective is categorized as Recall Knowledge, then this is the kind of question that might be used in an assessment task intended to cue students’ retrieval of that target information.

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ASSESSMENT TASK FOR RECALL-KNOWLEDGE OBJECTIVE

What are the four things that are necessary in the building of a successful industrial nation?

Recall Knowledge: Assessment: I

Assessment tasks, like instructional tasks, are response-demand activities that function as explicit manifestations of students’ implicit and unobservable cognitive processes. Assessment tasks for Recall-Knowledge objectives are designed to cue students’ retrieval from their long term-term memories of the target information that is appropriate for the objective. Students who adequately perform the assessment task for an objective thereby demonstrate their mastery of the objective, and that they are not likely to gain much from instruction for the objective. And students who perform the assessment task inadequately show that they are likely to benefit from instruction for the objective.

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Preparing an assessment task for a Recall-Knowledge objective is a useful way of identifying the target information students will be helped to encode into their long-term memories and later retrieve. This is especially true when objectives are not stated explicitly, such as this one.

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OBJECTIVE

Recall Knowledge: Know about the three parts of leaves.

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By itself, this objective does not clearly specify the target information that is appropriate for the objective. In designing the assessment task for the Recall-Knowledge objective, one is guided by the selection that is intended to be used in instructing for the objective.

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SELECTION

LEAVES

Leaves on plants have three parts. The lamina is the flat blade of the leaf. The petiole is the stalk that supports the lamina. The veins are the small tubes that branch out from the petiole. The main job of leaves is to make food for the plant. They make food by using the sun’s energy to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar. The sugar is then taken to the rest of the plant and used as food. The lamina contains chlorophyll, which is what makes sugar from carbon dioxide and water. Chlorophyll is what gives leaves their green color. The veins carry the sugar between cells in the lamina to the petiole. The veins also support the lamina. The petiole connects the lamina to the rest of the plant. It carries sugar from the veins to the rest of the plant.

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Based on this selection, it appears that the target information is entirely verbal, there are no visual drawings or pictures. Here is a reasonable identification of the important verbal information in the selection. Different people might identify different target information.

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TARGET INFORMATION FOR OBJECTIVE

1. Chlorophyll gives leaves their green color.

2. The lamina is the flat blade of a leaf.

3. The petiole is the stalk that supports the lamina.

4. Chlorophyll makes sugar from carbon dioxide and water.

5. Veins carry sugar between the cells in the lamina and the petiole.

6. Veins support the lamina.

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Here is an assessment task for the identified target information.

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ASSESSMENT TASK FOR OBJECTIVE

1. What gives leaves their green color?

2. What is the lamina of a leaf?

3. What is the petiole of a leaf?

4. What does chlorophyll do?

5. What two things do veins do?

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Students’ answers should contain the essential content identified as the target information, although their specific wordings will differ.

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The assessment task and its adequate response manifest in explicit terms the target information that students should be able to retrieve from their long-term memories. Instruction for the objective will begin when students are unable to perform the assessment task adequately. Instruction for the objective will end when students are able to perform the assessment task adequately.

Learning-Focused Instruction: Guidance

From a learning-focused perspective, instruction consists of two major components, tasks and guidance. While students actively perform instructional tasks the teacher provides instructional guidance intended to help them perform the tasks adequately [1].

Instructional guidance consists of the explicit and observable teacher actions that are intended to help students think their way through the implicit and unobservable cognitive processes for which an instructional task is intended. Students generally learn little, is anything, from performing tasks if they do not receive guidance of some kind during and after their performance of those tasks [2]. Instructional guidance may come from the teacher, from other students, from a computer-based program, or as a natural consequence of performing a task. How much students learn from performing an instructional task is directly related to how (a) frequently they are provided guidance while performing the task, and how (b) appropriate that guidance is for the task and the task’s objective [3].

Teachers adjust instructional guidance according to students’ continuously developing levels of ability by varying the explicitness of their guidance actions. When the teacher initiates instruction for an objective, gives students an appropriate instructional task, and students perform the task inadequately, the teacher then provides them very explicit guidance. As students’ learning progressively increases, the teacher provides them other suitable tasks and increasingly less explicit guidance. Reducing the specificity of guidance is done gradually, in accordance with students’ developing ability [4]. Two types of instructional guidance are decisive in determining the effectiveness of instruction, focusing attention and providing feedback [5].

While students perform an instructional task the teacher can focus their attention on the information the teacher wants them to learn. Attention is a state of mind wherein a person expects to process certain information while simultaneously suppressing other information [6]. Attention may involve the selection of information from two sources, (a) information from the environment and (b) information already stored in long-term memory [7]. The purpose for focusing students’ attention is to prime them to deal with certain information in ways that are pertinent for the instructional task and the knowledge category for which the task is designed [8]. An effective way of focusing students’ attention on pertinent information that is in their environment, or stored in their long-term memory, is to ask them priming questions [9].

While students perform an instructional task the teacher can provide feedback by giving them information about how well they are performing. Feedback functions in two ways, it (a) confirms the adequacy or inadequacy of students’ performance of tasks, and (b) corrects students’ inadequate task performance in ways that are intended to enable them to perform the same kind of tasks adequately the next time they do them [10].

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1 Kowitz, G.T., & Smith, J.C. (1985). The dynamics of successful feedback. Performance and Instruction, 24 (8), 4-6.

2 Moreno, R. (2004). Decreasing cognitive load in novice students: Effects of explanatory versus corrective feedback in discovery-based multimedia. Instructional Science, 32, 99-113.

3 Wood, D.J. (1980). Teaching the young child: Some relationships between social interactions, language, and thought. In D.R. Olson (Ed.), The social foundations of language and thought. New York: Norton.

4 Moore, R., & Goldiamond, I. (1964). Errorless establishment of visual discrimination using fading procedures. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 7, 269-272.

5. Levin, T. (1981). Effective instruction. Alexandra, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

6 Grabe, M. (1986). Attentional processes in education. In G.C. Phye & T. Andre (Eds). Cognitive classroom learning. New York: Academic Press

7 Posner, M.I. (1978) Chronometric explorations of the mind: The Third Paul M. Fitts Lecture. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum

8 Adams, A., Carnine, D.W., & Gersten, R. (1982). Instructional strategies for studying content area testa in the intermediate grades. Reading Research Quarterly, 18, 27-55.

9 Andre, T. (1979). Does answering higher level questions while reading facilitate productive learning? Review of Educational Research, 49, 280-318.

10 Duchastel, P. (1979). Learning objectives and the organization of prose. Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 11-16.

Learning-Focused Instruction: Tasks

From a learning-focused perspective, instruction consists of two major components, tasks and guidance. While students actively perform instructional tasks the teacher provides instructional guidance in helping them perform the tasks adequately.

Instructional tasks are response-demand activities that function as explicit and observable manifestations of students’ implicit and unobservable cognitive processes. For example, cognitive psychologists [1] studied children’s implicit and unobservable, age-related intellectual development by giving them explicit and observable tasks consisting of sorting differently colored geometric-shaped objects into groups. They were not told how to sort the objects. The same tasks were given to children of different ages, and the ways they sorted the objects were considered indicative of their implicit, age-related intellectual development. The studies found that children of different ages sorted the objects differently. Five-year olds tended to group the objects by color rather than geometric shape, all blue shapes in one group, red in another, and so forth. Eleven-year olds tended to group by geometric shapes rather than color, triangles in one group, rectangles in another, and so forth.

Different types of instructional tasks are required for each of the three categories of instructional practice because each category involves quite different implicit cognitive processes. Recall Knowledge tasks involve the implicit cognitive process of encoding information in long-term memory and then retrieving it in much the same way it was originally presented as sensory input. Application Knowledge tasks involve the implicit cognitive process of recognizing whether the novel objects and actions presented in the task are examples of a generalization by retrieving relevant encoded information from long-term memory and transferring it to the recognition of the novel objects and actions. Procedural Knowledge tasks involve the implicit cognitive process of retrieving from long-term memory and then enacting the action steps that are appropriate for solving the novel problem presented in the task.

Instructional tasks also involve subject matter. For example, here in brief form are instructional tasks for the science knowledge of electromagnetic induction. A task for Recall Knowledge might contain a diagram showing an example of an electromagnetic induction circuit with a number beside each component, and students are asked to write the name of each component beside its number. Another task for Recall Knowledge might contain only a blank page and students are asked to draw a diagram of an electromagnetic induction circuit and to write the name of each component beside it. A task for Application Knowledge might show students a series of diagrams of electric circuits they have not seen before and ask them to identify which are examples and which are non-examples of electromagnetic induction circuits, and ask for a justification of each identification. A task for Procedural Knowledge might consist of a box of electrical objects students have not seen before, and students are asked to construct a working model of electromagnetic induction, and to explain why their model is an example of electromagnetic induction.

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1. Gibson, E.J. and Levin, H. (1975). The psychology of reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Markman, E.M. (1981). Two different principles of conceptual organization. In M.E. Lamb & A.L. Brown (Eds), Advances in Developmental Psychology( Vol. 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Paradigm Shift Requires Focus Shift

Shifting from a traditional paradigm of instructional practice to the paradigm presented here, that aligns instruction with cognitive psychology, requires a comparable shift in the point of view of instruction, from exposure focused to learning focused. From the perspective of the teacher, exposure-focused instruction involves presenting information to students through lectures, recitation and group activities, and having students do teacher-made and commercially-produced textual and audiovisual materials. By contrast, from the perspective of the teacher, learning-focused instruction involves helping students acquire knowledge they do not possess when instruction begins by having them do appropriate tasks that require their active performance, while the teacher continually provides them guidance in ways intended to enable them to adequately perform the tasks, and thus acquire the desired knowledge. Extensive classroom research shows that most of the instruction provided in schools, ranging from kindergarten through graduate school, and in most academic subjects, is exposure focused [1].

Instructional reforms have failed largely because the innovations have been based on the same faulty exposure-focused view as the programs they replaced [2]. In a particularly illuminating study of the lack of genuine reform in mathematics instruction as a result of the nationwide introduction of new math programs a decade earlier, Sarason [3] found that the only observable difference between the way teachers instructed for mathematics in “new math” classrooms and in “traditional math” classrooms was that teachers in one used “new math” textbooks while teachers in the other used “traditional math” textbooks. Not surprisingly, the hoped for increases in students’ mathematics achievement as a result of the introduction of the new math programs were never realized. Sarason concluded that the effectiveness of classroom instruction is not likely to increase as long as the instruction teachers provide is based on an exposure-focused view. As a comic strip character once wondered, “How can you teach new math with an old math mind?”

A different kind of exposure-focused program has arisen and persisted during the last five decades, discovery programs. The programs are based on the premise that learning occurs when the student strives to make sense of material presented as a problem to be solved while carrying out activities such as group discussions, hands-on participation and interactive games. The teacher provides little or no guidance. As a natural result of working on the problem and doing the activities the student supposedly selects relevant incoming information from the problem, organizes it into a coherent structure and integrates it with other organized knowledge [4]. The first programs were called discovery learning, which gave way to something called experiential learning, which gave way to problem-based and inquiry learning, and then to constructivist instruction. The names of the programs changed each time research showed their predecessor’s ineffectiveness [5].

By contrast, learning-focused instruction, to which we will now turn, is based on theory-based research of how people learn, and on an understanding and utilization of the mechanisms by which they can be helped to learn. The focus is on the learner and guiding the learner, not on the materials and activities to which the learner is exposed.

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1. (For example). American Association for the Advancement of Science. Science for all Americans. (1989)., F. (1990). Washington, D.C.: Author.

2. (For example). Reif, F. (1990). Transcending prevailing approaches to science education. In M. Gardner, J.G. Greeno, F. Reif,,A.H. Schonfeld, A. diSessa, and E. Stage (Eds.). Toward a scientific practice of science education. (pp. 91-109). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

3. Sarason, S.B. (1971). The culture of school and the problem of change. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

4. Mayer, R.E. (2003). Learning and instruction. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.

5. Mayer, R.E. (2004). Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery? The case for guided methods of instruction. American Psychologist, Vol. 59 (1), 14-19.