Comments on: The Educators’ Guide to Skills-based Learning and Assessment Curriculum – 8: Lesson Planning

By: terrance

terrance — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 07:52:29 +0000

. thanks!

By: Jaime Buckley

Jaime Buckley — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:27:16 +0000

Benchmark lessons are critical for students as they develop the basic skills and concepts students need to proceed in their science education. For my benchmark lesson, I had my first grade students make observations about the growing classroom tadpoles. I chose this lesson because making and noting detailed observations is a skill my students will need forever. In order to give them practice in observing, I had them look at simple, familiar objects and explained how we can talk and write about each object.

By: Stewart Y. Fernandez

Stewart Y. Fernandez — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 05:17:17 +0000

With more complex skills or when students are introduced to new skills, learning often occurs more slowly and performance of the whole skill is not a good measure of learning and improvement. In these instances it is often more useful to use qualitative types of assessment. In qualitative tests, as the name suggests, we are looking for changes in the quality of the skill as it is performed rather than the outcome. For example, for a genuine beginner it would take a long time to be ready to rally a tennis ball against a wall for one minute using the proper forehand technique. Assessing this student’s learning from a one minute rallying test would not adequately indicate what the student had really learned. A better measure might be to ask the student to demonstrate the key parts of the tennis forehand while rallying against the wall (e.g. correct grip, sideways position, keeping the racquet head up, etc.). While the student might not be ready to play the game of tennis, improvement would be evident. For physical educators, a measure of learning and conversely teaching effectiveness would become available.