A preservice teacher told me once about observing a research project in which each student researched about an animal from a particular branch of the animal kingdom. She talked about how energetic the students were and how the resulting informative posters added color and splash to the classroom. The students, she said, really understood their animal.

I asked her why the students had done the project. “To learn about that group of animals,” she said. I asked her again: “Why did they do learn about individual animals?”

“To learn about classification.”

“How did the lesson help them learn about classification? Did they sort their animals to try to create or replicate a classification scheme?”

I watched something dawn on her face. “They just did the posters and hung them up.”

“So how did the research and the poster help them learn about classification?”

“It didn’t,” she replied. She was right. The task had become uncoupled from its objective of deeper understanding of classification.

Now, there’s no devil in this story. The teacher is exemplary in her field and had set aside a lot of time so her students would have a research opportunity. The preservice teacher has crackerjack observational skills. The students obviously completed the task with aplomb. But what had accidentally gotten lost in the hustle-bustle of the myriad of tasks on each party’s plate was that the task (making a poster) did not help students reach the objective of classification. The assessment didn’t match the learning objective.

It doesn’t mean that the project was a waste, by any means. Imagine extending it by one more day. The posters are done. The teacher clears a big empty spot in the middle of the room, and the students lay down their posters. Together, they sort them by common characteristics. How might they sort them into a scheme using their prior knowledge or what they learned in the individual research? How might they sort by habitat? color? longevity? diet? How might they apply the existing classification scheme and sort the posters into the formally-accepted hierarchy? How might the Latin names turn from mumbo-jumbo into clues as to the animal’s classification?

One thing librarians can bring to collaborative work with classroom teachers is a fresh perspective. And so we’re looking for your input: how do you match your lesson objectives — or the standard(s) you are trying to meet — with the assessments you design? How do you help assessments go beyond meeting minimum expectations on a checklist?

PS - Did you notice that I didn’t mention which type of animals the class studied? That’s intentional (even though it made for crummier writing). In the comments, take a guess …. how old were these students?

photo © 2007 Just Arrived | more info (via: Wylio)


Our preschool teachers may have been right. Researchers at Ben Gurion University have found several connections between cognitive skills later and hand-clapping earlier in life. Might be a reason to start elementary library classes with a song, eh?

Research Confirms that Hand-Clapping Songs Improve Motor and Cognitive Skills in Children and Adults via kwout

That’s the question two researchers ask in a commentary for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Now while the authors have come under a certain amount of attack, there are some very interesting points in this article that may point at why fewer people place demands on K-12 librarians to prepare students for college.

Is it possible … just a little bit … that some students aren’t getting the kinds of undergraduate experiences that require the diet of critical thinking and problem-solving that we anticipate?

If the researchers are correct, there’s a pretty low amount of cognitive growth happening for students. And why is that? The authors posit that it’s because everybody’s happy with how undergraduate education currently works. Students get time to socialize; administrators get a steady flow of tuition dollars; professors get time to work on projects; parents get a diploma to frame.

(Not sure I agree that everybody’s happy … I think most undergraduate professors at highly-ranked institutions are pretty happy, but I hear from ones at lower-ranked institutions that they see kids with poor study skills and little drive to learn … but then again, let’s get a reality check: nobody’s publishing my work in Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Take a minute to read this article in its entirety. Does it explain some of the placidity with which you see some parents, students, and colleagues when you make a plea for deep thinking activities? Does it explain why some governmental agencies and politicians don’t prioritize the very kinds of critical thinking skills librarians prize?

It’s a sobering essay, in any event. Read on.

Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything? - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout