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Hi, I'm Jason McKenna. Welcome back to the VEX Classroom, and welcome to another installment in our series of Connecting Research to Practice. In this video, we're gonna talk about eliciting understanding from your students.

Now, we've done a couple of videos on formative assessment. The reason why we've spent time talking about formative assessment is because the research tells us that formative assessment is a great way to raise our students' learning and understanding. Moreover, it's a cheap way to do it. It's easy for us to implement, and it doesn't cost a lot from either a time perspective or from a money perspective to actually be able to implement formative assessment.

The example I give all the time is, you know, one-to-one tutoring. If students were able to get one-to-one tutoring all day, research is very clear that their achievement would go up. But how much would it cost, and how disruptive would it be to our school day to have the students receive one-to-one tutoring all day, every day? That's certainly not very feasible. But formative assessment is feasible, and we have a lot of videos in this series talking about formative assessment.

This one is talking about how do I elicit student understanding? Remember, the purpose of assessment is communication. We want to be able to see what the student's current level of understanding is, compare that to the desired level of understanding, and then, if the current level does not meet the desired level, we want to design the intervention in order to get them to that desired level. So eliciting student understanding is exactly that actual process then. How do we actually get that information from the students from a formative assessment perspective, so we can then do whatever interventions that we would need to be able to do?

Now, how does this often happen in classrooms? I'm just as guilty of this as anybody else. You ask a question, one student answers the question, the student gets the question correct, and you're like, "Great, fantastic, let's move on." And of course, there's what? 29 other students in the classroom. So, you don't have any idea if all the students actually are at the desired level of understanding, but because that one student was, you then move on and do everything else in the class. So that's obviously not a good method that you want to undertake in order to be able to elicit understanding from our students.

Again, I'm just as guilty as anyone else, but there are some different methods that we can do in order to be able to help with this. Method number one is cold calling. Don't ask for volunteers. Instead, randomly pick students and ask them a question to see if they have the desired level of understanding. Now, this does a couple of things. Number one, it ensures that all students are now building that information in their head because there's an opportunity for any student to be called upon.

When you're doing this, you want to make sure that you actually present this in a way to your students so it's not punitive. You don't want your students to feel like you're embarrassing them, or you're calling on them with the purpose of putting them on the spot. You want to make sure that you establish an atmosphere in your classroom where this is viewed as communication and a learning opportunity, and not something the student should be apprehensive of. Obviously, if they get the answer wrong, we should handle that accordingly and make sure the student isn't embarrassed by that, or again, feels like he or she is being put on the spot as a result of it.

So, using cold calling in your classroom is a way to keep more of the students engaged. In addition to that, after you call on that student, make sure that you call on them again.

Thank you for joining us in this discussion on eliciting student understanding. We hope you found these insights helpful and look forward to seeing you in our next video.

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It doesn't have to be that class period, but in other class periods, make sure you model the process that just because I call on you once, doesn't mean that I'm not going to call on you again. That will keep all of your students engaged as you're going through that. Another way to do this is through the use of something like a mini whiteboard, or if you're using VEX 123, using the coder. This is one of the reasons why I love the coder so very much.

If you're asking your students to code the VEX 123 project, I'm sorry, VEX 123 Robot, to move into a square or do some different type of behavior, you can have the students hold up the coder. You can see the project on the coder right there, and you can now elicit what their understanding is as it relates to that code. Another reason why I love the coder so much. If you don't have the coder, you can use a mini whiteboard. You can have from a coding perspective, you can have the students write down the pseudo code that you want them to utilize and then have them hold it up, and you can give that quick formative assessment check to your students to know or be able to gauge your understanding. So mini whiteboards that each of your students can utilize, it's a cheap, but very effective way in order to be able to gauge all of your students' understanding.

A third thing that you can utilize is something that I used to utilize in my classroom, is exit slips. This way you give your students a quick two or three questions, that you can have them write down, they hand it to you at the end of the class period, and you can go through that very, very quickly. If you're using something like Google Classroom, you can use a Google Form to do this and even do that and handle it even faster if you want to. But that's a way that you can have the students and you can check in with your students as an exit slip to ensure that the objectives that you were hoping to accomplish that day, actually were accomplished. Again, eliciting student understanding.

You can do this at the end of class, but you can also use this as an opener for the following day's class. So you could do a classroom opener and what you review a topic that was covered a previous day, or if you're doing something in which you were spacing out the learning over the course of a long period of time, which research tells us is a great way to strengthen your students' understanding, you can use that classroom opener in order to, again, elicit understanding from all of your students.

So, doing something like cold calling, assuming again, that you have the correct classroom atmosphere to implement that, using something like mini whiteboards, exit slips, classroom openers, those are all great ways to elicit understanding from all of your students. Because again, what assessment is, it's communication, formative assessment is communication. We wanna understand the student's current level of understanding and compare that to the desired level of understanding. And if we can elicit understanding from all or most of our students, that means that we're just doing a much better job of it.

So, I gave a couple of different examples here, I'm sure that you have much better examples than I do. Please, share them into PD+ community, that's the purpose of it. Let's share what we do well, let's get better at it together, let's collaborate on those things and let's have a conversation there about how we can elicit understanding from our students when we are utilizing formative assessment in our classroom.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing you in a future video.

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