What every “B” student has in common
There is one thing that every B student in the United States has in common. Can you guess what it is? Go ahead, take a minute. I’ll wait.
Did you guess that every B student in the USA was simply unable to recall 11 to 20% of the content they learned? It seems simple enough but here’s the kicker: the 11–20% that each student misses is often different for each student despite the fact that they’ll all receive the same grade, a B.
Meaning we have students walking around with Swiss cheese holes in different aspects of their knowledge. We have schools of students who are simply swooped from concept to concept in class without full understanding. Students who will struggle later when they call upon missing foundational knowledge in attempt to problem solve a more complex topic later in the semester. How is this possible and how can we fix this?
First, let’s look at a fairly common scenario: you and two classmates all receive an 84% on the exact same algebra test. There are two likely scenarios about the items each of you got wrong: (1) all three of you got completely different problems wrong or (2) the problems each of you got wrong were wrong for different reasons.
Scenario one is fairly straight-forward. Perhaps one of you struggled to solve for p while the other failed to identify the equivalent equation and the last friend did not provide the correct solution set. But what if the reasons why each student answered each question incorrectly are not readily apparent? Are we allowing our children to walk around with gaping holes in their knowledge because there are 27 children in a class and there’s no time to stop and fill in those holes?
Scenario two has the potential to be far more complex. If each student got the same problem wrong, say the ability to identify an equivalent equation, there may be several reasons why their answer is wrong. Perhaps one person made a silly computational error while another misunderstood the ability to scale both sides by a single number or perhaps another student failed to equally reduce both sides of the equation. There are many ways in which the same question can be answered wrong. How do we ensure our children see the ways in which they solved the problem wrong so that when this knowledge is required for future use it is readily available and correct?
There seem to be more questions than answers: How can we get granular enough to see what steps students are getting wrong without losing the students interest in the process? How can we see what pieces of the text they reference as support for their writing, which steps they take towards solving for p, or what mechanisms they reference when describing a fulcrum in physics? And how can we share this information, the parts where students struggle as well as where they succeed, and provide it to teachers to reinforce and support learning?
To begin to form an answer we must first look at the experts, teachers. Teachers collect this information intuitively during instruction. The formative assessment teachers collect helps to inform their instruction, remediate for students who are struggling, accelerate those who need an extra challenge, and provide opportunities for grouping students in ways to maximize and specialize their learning. But it’s impossible to expect a single teacher to sit with each student and study the nuances of their problem solving with enough regularity to fill in all those Swiss cheese holes. However, educational games keep students deeply engaged in game play while providing teachers with rich documentation about student growth and learning.
Using formative assessment tools like my personal favorite Socrative allow teachers to see student comprehension in real time and adjust instruction based on their feedback before, during, or after a lesson. But more engaging opportunities are possible. Well-developed games for learning are partners to teachers in that they provide granular information about how students approach problem solving while also revealing the ways students are mastering learning objectives.
The market is ripe for formative assessment tools that support teachers in better evaluating student knowledge. The best tools will look at the way in which students problem solve and provide support for their ways of knowing. Plenty of solutions have been attempted but there is great room to provide tools that are immediately implementable in classrooms.
There is no reason for our children to walk through the halls of school with gaping holes in their knowledge. There is no such thing as a “B” student, it’s an imprudent construct similar to calling yourself a “visual learner” when in reality it’s just an opportunity to use feedback to fill in those holes and prepare our children to be the innately curious problem solvers they were all born to be.
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Lindsay Portnoy is co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer at Killer Snails, a gaming company that uses extreme creatures of nature to build immersive and engaging learning experiences aligned to meaningful assessments that support educators.
