★ Must-know
Direct instruction is best suited to basic skills such as science facts, mathematics computations, reading vocabulary, and grammar rules because these tasks are relatively unambiguous and can be taught step by step.
Rosenshine's six teaching functions are:
Further detail
Integrated planning themes include courage; diversity and variation; survival; groups and institutions; communities of the future; communication and language; human rights and responsibilities; identity and coming of age; interdependence; change and conservation; and probability and prediction. - Clarke, J. H. & Agne, R. M., Curriculum development: Interdisciplinary high school teaching, 1997
Teacher presentations are most appropriate for remembering, understanding, applying, receiving, responding, and valuing, and can efficiently introduce topics, provide background, or communicate substantial material.
Direct instruction can help manage cognitive load through brief, clear presentations and guided practice, while examples and nonexamples help students build connected concepts and reveal misconceptions.
📌 Direct instruction provides needed guidance, but students construct meaning from that instruction rather than simply receiving knowledge passively. - Deanna Kuhn, 2007
Review, present, guide, correct, practice, review again.
★ Must-know
Independent work should follow a lesson as supervised practice with quick feedback, rather than serve as the main mode of instruction.
Independent work should have clear goals, connect visibly to the lesson, provide needed materials, and be moderately difficult so it is neither too easy nor too hard.
The relationship between homework and achievement is weak for young students but grows progressively stronger for older students. - Harris Cooper and his colleagues, 2006
Students' self-reported effort on homework is consistently and positively related to achievement, and effort need not correspond closely to time spent. - Trautwein et al., 2009
Further detail
📌 The National Education Association's 10-minute rule assigns 10 minutes of homework per night starting in first grade and adds 10 minutes per grade, resulting in about 120 minutes per night for a 12th-grader.
Among eighth-grade homework learner types, fast learners and high-effort learners had significantly better grades and test scores over the year than the other groups. - Barbara Flunger and her colleagues, 2015
Homework is more likely to elicit effort when students find it interesting, valuable, reasonably challenging, and not anxiety-provoking, so assignments may need to be differentiated.
Independent work practices a lesson; it should not replace instruction.
The IRF pattern of recitation consists of (Burbules & Bruce, 2001):
Effective questions can support recall, expose gaps in knowledge, provoke curiosity, nurture long-term interest, initiate cognitive conflict, and guide a novice's learning.
★ Must-know
📌 Convergent questions have only one right answer, whereas divergent questions allow many possible answers.
Authentic questions give students influence over discussion, connect topics to their lives, encourage broader participation, and prompt critical thinking and analysis. - Kelly et al., 2018
For younger and lower-ability students, a successful questioning pattern uses simple questions with frequent correct answers, encouragement, help when answers are incorrect, and praise; high-ability students benefit from harder questions at both higher and lower levels and more critical feedback.
Waiting 3 to 5 seconds after asking a question tends to produce longer answers, broader participation, more questions and appropriate volunteering, more analysis, synthesis, inference, and speculation, and greater student confidence. - Sadker & Sadker, 2006
📌 After an honest but partly or completely wrong answer, probe, give clues, simplify the question, review earlier steps, or reteach; correct a silly or careless wrong answer and move on.
Further detail
Sadker and Sadker (2006) estimate that a typical teacher asks 30 to 120 questions per hour, or about 1,500,000 over a teaching career. - Sadker & Sadker
Deep explanations can address (Pashler et al., 2007): causes and consequences of historical events, motivations of people involved in historical events, scientific evidence for particular theories, logical justifications for the steps of a mathematical proof
Question prompts include (Pashler et al., 2007):
Teachers wait an average of only 1 second for students to answer, according to Rowe’s classic research.
📌 When students appear lost or do not understand a question, rephrase it or ask someone to clarify it, because simply waiting longer will not help.
📌 A quick, firm, correct answer can be accepted or followed by another question, while a correct but hesitant answer calls for feedback explaining why it is correct.
The four feedback levels are (John Hattie and Helen Timperley, 2007):
Process and self-regulation feedback are especially powerful because they support deep understanding, mastery, and self-directed learning. - John Hattie and Helen Timperley, 2007
Convergent questions seek one right answer; divergent questions allow many.
★ Must-know
Murphy and colleagues found that discussion approaches can increase student talk, reduce teacher talk, and promote literal interpretation, but more student talk does not necessarily improve critical thinking, reasoning, or argumentation. - Karen Murphy and her colleagues, 2009
Quality Talk involves preparing students before discussion, facilitating evidence-based and increasingly student-led discussion, and following up with feedback, checks for understanding, critical reflection, and goals for the next discussion. - Murphy et al.
Further detail
A study of 64 middle schools found that only 1.6 minutes per 60-minute class were devoted to student-centered discussions. - Applebee et al., 2003
Group discussions can increase motivation and engagement and help students express ideas, justify opinions, tolerate different views, seek clarification, examine their thinking, follow interests, and take leadership roles.
Group discussions can be unpredictable, digress, cause anxiety for some students, become unwieldy in large groups, and allow a few students to dominate; teachers may need to maintain focus, connection to learning materials, and attentive listening.
In Quality Talk, students meet in groups of four to six; the teacher selects the text and topic, while students control turn-taking and their interpretations rather than seeking one right answer. - Murphy et al.
Quality Talk moves from preparation, to discussion, to reflection.
★ Must-know
📌 Direct instruction is associated with better achievement-test performance, whereas open methods are associated with better creativity, abstract thinking, problem solving, school attitudes, curiosity, cooperation, and lower absence rates.
Further detail
UbD works backward: goals, evidence, then learning plan.
★ Must-know
📌 Designed differentiation plans supports and scaffolding in advance, whereas interactional differentiation adapts instruction during teaching. - Puzio et al., 2020
📌 Effective ability groups adjust content, process, and product to provide appropriate challenge and support within each student’s zone of proximal development.
Further detail
Successful differentiation uses clear conceptual goals, varied assessment data, careful planning around students’ needs, preferences, and strengths, and flexible adaptation of curriculum and instruction. - Kelly Puzio et al., 2020
Differentiation can vary content through text types, modified texts, or difficulty; process through task length or tools; and product through different compositions or performances. - Puzio et al., 2020
Classrooms may contain ability differences of three to five years. - Castle et al., 2005
No definitive evidence shows that within-class ability grouping is superior to other approaches, and 63% of a random sample of U.S. primary-grade teachers reported using it for reading.
Students in lower-ability groups were less likely to receive critical comprehension questions and had fewer opportunities to choose what to read. - Chorzempa & Graham, 2006
Flexible grouping uses continuous assessment and can arrange students in small groups, pairs, individually, or as a whole class, with high-level instruction and high expectations for everyone. - Corno, 2008
In a five-year study of flexible grouping at a high-needs urban elementary school, mastery-level attainment increased by 10% to 57% depending on subject and grade, and 95% of teachers used flexible grouping by the study’s end. - Castle et al., 2005
📌 Effective flexible grouping requires accurate and continuous assessment, appropriately different instruction for each group, meaningful and respectful work, limited ability grouping to one or two subjects, and no more than two or three groups.
Designed differentiation is planned ahead; interactional differentiation adapts during teaching.
★ Must-know
📌 The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires that all students eligible for special education services be considered for assistive technology.
Further detail
Computer instructional programs can repeat lessons and steps as often as needed, supporting students who learn new concepts through small steps and repeated practice.
Assistive programs can use images, sounds, and game-like features to sustain the attention of students with attention-deficit disorders.
Text-to-speech tools can speak selected words or convert printed pages and typed text into spoken words, supporting students with reading difficulties or blindness and others who benefit from hearing information.
Word processors let students whose handwriting is illegible record, reorganize, and improve their ideas without rewriting by hand. - Hallahan et al., 2019
★ Must-know
📌 Teachers should recognize individual differences in learning and interests, offer choices, layer lessons, use available resources for English learners, and praise students’ individual characteristics and accomplishments.
📌 Teachers should avoid preconceived opinions about students, handle student situations discreetly and judiciously, and build trust through cooperative work and early-year icebreakers.
Further detail
CAST, the Center for Applied Special Technology, has led the development of universal design for learning, and its Guidelines for Universal Design for Learning are used around the world.
The UDL guidelines organize learning around engagement and the “why,” representation and the “what,” and action and expression and the “how.”
For varied reading levels, teachers can use small groups, appoint a student leader to lead oral recitations and design comprehension questions, keep early readings brief, and later assign readings as homework with a short written comprehension response.
Small-group interaction should take no more than 15 minutes in a single class period, preserving time for whole-class grammar lessons.
UDL links the Why, What, and How of learning.
📌 Formative assessment occurs before or during instruction to guide teaching and help students improve; interim assessment occurs at regular intervals to track progress and growth; summative assessment occurs after instruction to measure achievement or proficiency. - Northwest Education Association, 2015
Formative shapes learning, interim tracks growth, and summative judges achievement.
★ Must-know
📌 A test must be reliable to be valid, but reliability alone does not establish validity.
Every student’s learning is embedded in culture, and test questions draw on cultural knowledge, so teachers should consider the cultural assumptions in the questions they ask.
In a study, evaluators identified more mistakes when told to grade a student’s work by counting errors and believing the student came from a lower-SES family; the difference in identified mistakes between high- and low-SES students was reduced when evaluators were told to provide feedback to guide learning (Autin et al., 2019).
Further detail
📌 Content-related validity evidence shows that a test covers important course topics without extraneous content; criterion-related evidence shows that scores relate to an outcome the test is intended to predict; construct-related evidence supports that the test measures the intended psychological characteristic.
Reliable means consistent; valid means supported for the intended use.
★ Must-know
Norm-referenced scores do not establish readiness for advanced learning: even students in the top 3% of a class may not have mastered the material if the whole class has limited understanding.
Criterion-referenced results identify what students can and cannot do under specified conditions, making this approach appropriate for formative and interim assessments.
Further detail
Educational norm groups may be drawn from:
National norm samples for large-scale assessment programs may be tested in one year and used for comparison for several years until the test is revised or re-normed.
Because national norm groups include a wide range of socioeconomic-status levels and students from high-SES backgrounds tend to score higher on many standardized tests, a high-SES district will almost always score above the national norm group.
Norm-referenced tests cover broad outcomes and are especially appropriate when only the top candidates can be admitted to a program.
Norm-referenced testing is poorly suited to psychomotor outcomes, which require comparison with clear performance standards, and to affective outcomes such as personal attitudes and values.
A criterion-referenced test of adding three-digit numbers could set mastery at 17 correct answers out of 20; students scoring 7 and 11 both fall short and need further help.
Criterion-referenced tests can be unsuitable when a subject cannot be divided into specific targets, when the standard is arbitrary, or when comparison with students at local or national grade levels is needed.
Norms compare students with people; criteria compare performance with a standard.
★ Must-know
📌 A textbook test is suitable when it is high quality, covers learning goals, matches the testing plan and instruction, and asks students to demonstrate what they were taught; teachers should also check its reading level and revise it for their class as needed.
📌 Choose the item format that most directly measures the intended learning outcome; use multiple-choice when formats are equally suitable because it is easier to score fairly and can cover many topics.
Good multiple-choice items use: a clear stem with one problem, positive wording, grammatically compatible and concise alternatives, one correct or best answer, distractors based on common errors or misconceptions
Essay tests cover less material than selected-response tests because answering essays takes time, so they should focus on important, complex learning outcomes.
📌 Essay grading is made fairer and more reliable by sharing scoring criteria or a rubric, assigning points to answer components, checking comparability within grade groups, grading all responses to one question before moving to the next, shuffling papers between questions, and grading anonymously when possible.
Further detail
Selected-response formats include multiple-choice, matching, and true/false items; short-answer or fill-in items are constructed-response formats. Scoring these item types is relatively straightforward because answers are more clear-cut than essay responses.
Matching is preferable when students must link related concepts such as terms and definitions, while true/false or fill-in items can be alternatives when suitable multiple-choice distractors are difficult to create.
Varying item formats can reduce anxiety because a student’s entire grade does not depend on one question type that the student may find difficult.
True/false items should be simple declarative sentences that are entirely true or entirely false as written.
Matching items should have clear directions, no more than 10 items to match, homogeneous content, brief grammatically consistent options, and more response options than items.
Fill-in items should ask a question, provide one blank per item, avoid using blank length as a clue, and place the blank toward the end.
Carefully written multiple-choice items can assess higher-order outcomes by asking students to apply or analyze concepts, but doing so is difficult (Waugh & Gronlund, 2013).
In Mark Smith’s 2017 think-aloud study, multiple-choice items intended to assess historical thinking instead appeared to assess factual knowledge, reading comprehension, and test-taking skills.
An exit-ticket routine gathers evidence after a lesson, guides reteaching, and helps organize peer discussion.
Exit tickets can also be a two-minute fast write on lesson ideas or a description of the muddiest, most confusing point, and anonymous responses can still reveal what needs reteaching.
Journals can reveal students’ concerns, interests, and academic understanding; one physics teacher used students’ journal responses to recognize that their assumptions about friction, acceleration, and velocity came from personal experience rather than scientific reasoning, prompting changes to instruction (Banks, 2012).
Teachers also conduct informal assessment whenever they ask questions or observe students performing skills.
Students can contribute by: examining and revising sample work, explaining their approach and challenges, planning around strengths and weaknesses, writing and answering test questions in pairs, reflecting on growth, identifying what and how to study before a test
After an ungraded quiz, students can analyze their mistakes and plan how to improve, using the quiz as formative feedback rather than discarding it.
When learning goals include writing, speaking, listening, creating, critical thinking, research, problem solving, or applying knowledge, assessments should ask students to perform those same activities.
Authentic performance assessments treat tasks such as recitals, science fair projects, games, and mock court trials as demonstrations of learning, making performance itself an appropriate instructional target.
Notice learning, give feedback, then ask students to perform authentically.
★ Must-know
📌 A process portfolio documents learning and progress, whereas a best-work portfolio showcases final accomplishments. - Johnson & Johnson, 2002
Further detail
The quiz-review form groups learning targets into those answered correctly, those missed because of a fixable mistake, and those still needing learning, with students recording improvement actions for the latter two groups.
Performance assessments may involve:
A real-money role-play or mock class store lets students practice purchases and giving change instead of answering a verbal change-making question.
Process portfolios show growth; best-work portfolios showcase accomplishments.
★ Must-know
Further detail
📌 Rubrics should be neither so task-specific that they apply only to one task nor so general that they offer no useful guidance. - James Popham, 2020
🔄 A rubric may be developed by:
Student participation in developing rubrics helps them understand quality expectations in advance, and practice designing and applying rubrics can improve their work and learning.
Reliability of performance scoring may improve when raters are experienced and rubrics are well developed and refined.
📌 A rubric designed for a specific task may not validly predict performance beyond very similar tasks.
Model, identify criteria, describe quality levels, practice, assess, revise.
★ Must-know
📌 Assessment methods should be matched to the learning target, because different outcomes require different assessment methods.
📌 Useful feedback explains why answers are right or wrong, supplies additional correct examples for concepts, discusses better learning strategies, and is discussed with students so they understand and value it.
Further detail
A literacy assessment of claims about symbolism asked students to order plot events, organize claims and evidence with a graphic guide, and write an essay comparing two coming-of-age stories; a rubric assessed claims, textual support, organization of similarities and differences, and clarity. - Carol Lee and Susan Goldman, 2015
Feedback should (Lorien Schuldt, 2019):
★ Must-know
Further detail
Grading on the curve can limit the number of high grades, encourage ranking, fail to communicate what students know or can do, and undermine motivation.
In a criterion-referenced system, every student can theoretically earn an A by meeting the criteria, and grades relate achievement to defined instructional goals or standards.
Errors in low-stakes contexts can enhance learning when followed by corrective feedback, reteaching, and opportunities to improve in a safe classroom with an appropriately challenging task. - Wong & Lim, 2019
High standards are generally related to increased academic learning, but teachers must balance them with a reasonable chance for students to succeed.
Children retained in a grade are more likely to be: male, members of minority groups, living in poverty, younger, less likely to have participated in early childhood programs
Norm-referenced grades compare students; criterion-referenced grades measure mastery of objectives.
| Level | Expected thinking | Example prompt |
|---|---|---|
| Remembering | Recall or recognize learned information | List the capitals |
| Understanding | Explain material without necessarily relating it elsewhere | Summarize in your own words |
| Applying | Use information to solve a problem | Calculate the area |
| Analyzing | Break into parts, infer, or test evidence | Which statements are facts or opinions? |
| Evaluating | Judge merits using standards | Which strategy is best for you? |
| Creating | Produce an original plan or idea | How could we combine those ideas? |
| Level | Focus |
|---|---|
| Task | The specific work or content |
| Process | Strategies used to complete the task |
| Self-regulation | Monitoring and directing one's learning |
| Self-feedback | Personal judgments or praise |
Take a 61-question practice quiz on Classroom Assessment and Testing, with every answer explained.
1. Which description best defines direct instruction, also called explicit teaching?
2. A teacher is choosing a topic for step-by-step direct instruction. Which topic is the best fit?
Memorize the key concepts of Classroom Assessment and Testing with 95 flashcards.
Who identified direct instruction as systematic teaching for mastery, and in what year?
Barak Rosenshine and Robert Stevens, 1986.
Why is direct instruction suited to basic skills such as computations and grammar rules?
These tasks are relatively unambiguous and can be taught step by step.
What are Rosenshine’s six teaching functions, according to Rosenshine (1988)?
Review prior work; present material in small steps with examples and nonexamples; guide practice to about 80% accuracy; give feedback and correctives; provide independent practice at about 95% success; review weekly and monthly.
Upload your class notes and Revizly writes a study guide, a quiz and flashcards in about a minute.
Study guide maker