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Extending Thinking to Raise Achievement: Standards Driven Learning Grades 3-8
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The Learning-Focused Connections Newsletter is a weekly link to exemplary practice and ideas that will help you as an educator to increase achievement in your classroom and school. Some weeks there will be a mix of articles in the mailer; other weeks we will follow a theme. We are all working with the same goal in mind, continuous improvement in student achievement.
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Restart the Attention Clock and Ensure Learning!
by Denise Burson
Given that students have a short attention span and classes are scheduled for around 50 or 75 minutes, teachers must do something to control their students' attention and ensure learning is taking place. We recommend using "distributed summarizing" to restart the attention clock. Johnstone and Percival report that teachers who "adopted this approach . . . and deliberately and consistently interspersed their teaching with question prompts, illustrative models or experiments, . . . short problem solving sessions, . . . teachers commanded a better attention span from the class, and these deliberate variations had the effect of postponing or even eliminating the occurrence of an attention break". When teachers intersperse question prompts with active engagement for students for as brief a time as two to five minutes, students are re-energized and learning takes place.
By planning exactly when to insert a question prompt, you can make sure that your students pay the most attention to the issues and concepts that are the most important. Do not ask questions for their own sake; they should be integrally related to giving students practice with the most important concepts in that day's class. This helps students to become responsible and aware of their own learning. Confusions, misconceptions or misunderstandings surface and teachers can then adapt teaching accordingly. The research on the mind gives us the theoretic base for advocating distributed summarizing throughout the lesson to actively engage the learner. A large body of research tells us that when the goal is to foster higher-level cognitive or affective learning, teaching methods, which encourage student activity and involvement, are preferable to more passive methods. What better way to get students actively engaged than to have them talk about what they are learning? Ask them to explain their new knowledge to one another. By making the classroom a social learning experience instead of a solitary one, teachers can reduce the student passivity and increase learning.
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How to Create Effective Instructional Materials for All Students
by Cindy Riedl
The increasing diversity of students in classrooms has caused many educators to search for easy-to-implement methods to improve the delivery of information that meets the needs of a wide range of learners. One of the easiest ways to improve access to information for all students, including those with learning disabilities, is by applying the basic rules of graphic arts and design to all written materials. This includes Word Walls, board work, graphic and advance organizers, as well as overhead or PowerPoint presentations. The teacher, using the same principles, to be more effectively appropriate for instruction, can also easily modify commercially prepared materials.
Teachers should be concerned with the elements of design because they determine how well the message of any material is transferred to the reader. Good, clear visual signals help the student to grasp concepts more quickly (Using Type Right, Brady, 1993). Vast amounts of money are spent on research to produce the most effective graphic designs in advertisements to persuade the public to purchase goods or services. Those working in the field of layout and design have carefully researched techniques to enhance readability of design materials that can be used by teachers easily and successfully in the classroom during instruction.
Teachers do not have to be artists to implement these useful characteristics of layout and design that are clearly related to improving readability of text. They only have to consider each of the following basic elements when preparing instructional materials, which will help ensure that students can easily locate and identify information critical to learning.
Contrast is the first element on the list of effective design principles. It can either attract or repel the reader. Contrast, or emphasis, creates interest by providing variety and helps the reader locate critical information quickly. It can be created carefully considering the background and text color of any material, (The Digital Teaching Portfolio Handbook: A How To Guide for Educators, Kibane & Milman, 2003). The color of the text should be different and distinct from the color of the background. Extreme white paper has been shown to result in the greatest legibility, (Graphic Design and Reading, Swanson, 2000). Although using various colors for lettering may create greater student interest, lighter colors should be avoided because they may not stand out against similar paper or backgrounds.
Size is the second element of contrast. Larger items will draw attention when paired with smaller ones. The use of a larger font when paired with smaller types creates dramatic contrast and draws the reader's attention to critical information. Also, using colored print or highlighting is a simple technique to help students locate items. Teachers can highlight critical information on prepared materials or teach students highlighting skills as a preliminary to starting work on any written task. On the other hand, bold-faced fonts should be used infrequently because too much bold type darkens the page making it look dense and uninviting for the reader. Furthermore, bold-faced fonts in the middle of a block of text should be avoided, because they tend to draw too much attention to a specific word and away from the other words in the area. Instead, surround critical information with space that is free of text or artwork and creates the desired contrast. The more important the information, the greater the white space surrounding it should be. In this way, the use of white space helps avoid clutter on the page and makes materials easier to read.
Special education teachers place boxes around critical information on student materials. Using thick, dark borders helps draw the eyes to materials. These word boxes can be especially helpful to students but it is important to make sure that the lines used are not so thick that they become more visually interesting than the text they surround. The use of underlining text should be used sparingly because it obscures descending letters and may interfere with decoding of words. Highlighting is preferred to underlining.
Positioning or alignment is one of the most important elements of layout and design that can make reading either easier or more difficult. When layout facilitates natural eye movement, reader comprehension improves. Critical titles or directions should be placed at the top left corner of the paper. Also, instructional materials should be typed or printed - not penned. When conveying important information on the board, print should be used because most students learn to read textbooks with a roman type- face and have become conditioned to read such fonts most easily. Therefore, for students who are younger or disabled, teachers should select a font that closely matches this print. Reading distance and age determines font size. Font sizes of 9 through 12 are most legible for adults, whereas a larger font size should be used for younger students or those with disabilities. For overheads used in the classroom, fonts that are larger than 12 or 14 are necessary for easy readability. If using a page from the text, the teacher needs to enlarge the passage first on a copier, and then create the overhead copy for viewing.
For those teachers who continue to be concerned about the rationale that supports word-shape outlines for Word Walls, they should read what Swanson wrote: " Words are perceived by their specific word-shape outline, which is unique for lower case words". (Graphic Design and Reading, 2000) Once the outline of a word has been learned, future recognition of that word occurs as a unit, not letter by letter. Using all capital letters removes the word shape outlines, thus forcing the reader to use letter-by-letter decoding, slowing the reading process down by as much as 20 %.
When deciding whether to use artwork on materials, care should be taken to assure that the graphic or artwork helps students focus on and learn the important information being presented. Some students will recall the picture associated with the written material better than the written material itself. When using pictures, teachers should glance quickly at the page and determine where their eyes are drawn. If the picture distracts their eyes from the print, the page may need to be simplified.
In summary, because teachers continue to be challenged by students with more diverse learning needs, more attention should be given to the elements of design and how they can be used effectively to improve learning. The techniques discussed will guide teachers as they make decisions concerning instructional materials, Word Walls, board work, study sheets and overhead or PowerPoint presentations.
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The Goal of Writing
by Brenda Hill
Writing is an effective tool of communication and the goal is for students to be able to express thoughts, feelings, and ideas well in writing. Students write in a variety of ways for many purposes from different perspectives. As students begin to write for different audiences and for different purposes writing becomes a powerful learning tool - deepening understanding of content, aiding in memory and retention, reinforcing skills and concepts learned, and supporting reading and vocabulary development. Sometimes students are asked to write to learn - writing to inform - paper or essays connected to the content. These longer writing assignments are more formal and the audience is usually someone else. Other times students simply write a summary point statement or a brief paragraph about the subject that occurs as part of an acquisition lesson. These shorter writing assignments are embedded in content acquisition lessons and students are asked to write at the beginning, during, or at the end of the lesson. One example of a "beginning" writing assignment for a content lesson might be having students write prediction statements about a topic from a word splash. An example of a "during" writing assignment would be having student summarize their learning in one or two sentences up to that point in the lesson - summary point writing. Writing at the "end" of the lesson would have students use the graphic organizer to construct a brief paragraph to answer the lesson essential question.
As we plan for writing lessons based upon state standards we can greatly increase student achievement when we begin to think about students writing across the curriculum. According to D.B. Reaves in his book, Accountability in Action: A Blueprint for Learning Organization, "Teachers in successful 90/90/90 schools placed a very high emphasis on informative writing. The benefits appear to be two-fold. First, students process information in a much clearer way, and second, teachers have the opportunity to gain rich and complex diagnostic information about students, as an emphasis on writing improvement has a significant impact on student test scores in other disciplines.
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Note taking: How to Teach and Scaffold this Skill
by Carolyn Boyles
Many students who have deficits in reading and writing skills also have difficulty in taking notes and summarizing information presented in class or from their readings. Directly and explicitly teaching a structured note taking strategy is important - even critical - as students move into expository texts and content.
One scaffolding strategy that can reduce the writing required, separate key points from details and be used as a study strategy when preparing for review and test taking is a variation of the Cornell Notes strategy. Students are given a structure for their note-taking with cues provided that direct their attention to where to record information and what to write. This scaffolding can be faded as students become proficient and as they are older and are better able to discern key ideas from details.
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Past Connections Articles
Past Connections articles are available through the archive tool of this newsletter. Please click here to view these resources.
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