The Final Exam Data

A GREAT blog post by a teacher testing Doug Lemov's techniques, as outlined in the fabulous Teach Like a Champion:

 

I'm not one to take a book like Doug Lemov's on faith.  I loved the ideas, and I loved the techniques, but I also wasn't completely convinced that his work was truly useful to everybody.  And Paul Bambrick-Santoyo asserted even more radically in his book that the only way to close the achievement gap was to create and then dig deep into the data about individual students and their responses to individually crafted questions.

 

So I did what any good scientist would do.  I conducted a test, in two parts. The first part was that I taught for two weeks, very consciously using Doug Lemov's techniques, in the first part of May.  I used the techniques with two classes of ninth graders, who were graduating anyway, and thus avoided the risk of accidentally 'contaminating' a class with bad ideas.  I then spent the last two weeks of school "doing what I usually do" and being much less strict about using Lemov's techniques.

 

…The results were staggeringly obvious.  I almost fell over in shock.

 

On almost all of the questions in the first half of the multiple choice examination, every student picked the best or second best answer.  No one picked the wrong answer, and there were only four 'inadequate' answers.   Doing things my usual way, though, resulted in incredibly low scores across the board.  The number of 'inadequate' and 'second-best' answers surged.  All of the no-response-givens were in the second half of the test, and most of them in the last quarter of the test — the material most recently studied.

 

…The essays were even more revealing, once I had a clear set of guidelines about what I was looking for. 

 

…All of them wrote clearly and consciously and competently about those portions of Gilgamesh which they had learned while I used Lemov's techniques in the classroom and in assessing work.  They had grasped and absorbed that material thoroughly.  That material dealing with the current events of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf — they got that material too, if I taught it during the first two weeks of class. If it was stuff I presented to them in my usual way, about half of them got it, a third more sort-of got it, and the rest of them didn't.

 

The irony here is that without Bambrick-Santoyo's insistence on a carefully designed test or assessment, I wouldn't have known any of this.  I could have taught Lemov's way, or dumped most of it, or kept only the interesting parts.  I'd have philosophically agreed with him, or not, and moved on.  But by deciding to test both of them together, and 'comparing notes' so to speak, I learned things about them, and about my students, and about myself, that thirteen years of teaching hadn't taught me.

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http://andrewbwatt.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/the-final-exam-data/

 

 

The Final Exam Data