Activating Students as Owners of Their Own Learning – Notes from Embedded Formative Assessment

“We know that students are more motivated to reach goals that are specific, are within reach, and offer some degree of challenge…”
“… students provided with positive constructive feedback by their teachers were more likely to focus on learning rather than performance.”

Integrating Motivational and Cognitive perspectives
When students are invited to participate in a learning activity, they use three sources of information to decide what they are going to do:
1 Their perceptions of the task and its context (for example, school, class, and so on)
2 Their knowledge about the task and what it will take to be successful
3 Their motivational beliefs, including their interest and whether they think they know enough to succeed

Things that can be done to get students to choose a growth mindset:
1 Share learning goals with students so that they are able to monitor their own progress toward them
2 Promote the belief that ability is incremental rather than fixed; when students think they can’t get smarter, they are likely to devote their energy to avoiding failure
3 Make it more difficult for students to compare themselves with others in terms of achievement
4 Provide feedback that contains a recipe for future action rather than a review of past failures (a medical rather than a post mortem)
5 Use every opportunity to transfer executive control of the learning from the teacher to the students to support their development as autonomous learners

Practical Techniques
Traffic lights
Red/Green Disks
Coloured Cups
Learning Portfolios
Learning Logs

Five Key strategies of classroom formative assessment
1 Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success
2 Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning
3 Providing feedback that moves learning forward
4 Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
5 Activating learners as owners of their own learning

“We know that the teacher is the most powerful influence on how much a student learns and that teachers can continue to make significant improvements in their practice throughout their careers. If all teachers accept the need to improve practice, not be ause ey are not good enough, but because they can be even better, and focus on the things that make the biggest difference to their students, according to the research, we will be able to prepare our students, according to the research, we will be able to prepare our students to thrive in the impossibly complex, unpredictable world of the 21st century.”

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