Blog Post 5

Last class, we spoke about fake news and its relation to information literacy. We saw a push by librarians to increase the ability for students to determine the validity of a source and the recent elections has only made the need for info literacy more prominent. Is the fake news movement the same as the information literacy movement? Fake news acts to highlight the need for information literacy but importantly shows that literacy skills are changing. We now have an incredible amount of sources that we can quickly skim over in minutes. This changes the way students analyze the content of articles because they are reading the materials differently. 

One critical skill students must have that can be facilitated in the classroom is the ability to explain the reasons behind their predictions. Teachers should help students by testing student thinking and help students see why ideas change and evolve to adapt to new knowledge. Progressive formalization allows students adjust ideas by understanding what ideas students bring to the classroom and using these to build formalized approaches that can be used to solve problems in a specific domain. Along with being able to adapt knowledge to the domain, students need to be exposed to the domains naturally. By presenting expertise to students through situations and contexts, students will be able to better see how knowledge in one domain can transfer to another. Teachers must provide students with feedback throughout their learning. This feedback can be either formal or informal. Teachers who help students develop skills in self-assessment and metacognition tend to be more efficient in instruction. In addition, teachers should consider whether the feedback is direct or indirect. In writing, for example, teachers can make an immediate change to a grammar mistake, or they can identify the location of the error and say why it is wrong, asking the student to apply knowledge into this situation. 

Assessment is often a challenge in the classroom and over time, the types of assessment have generally changed from summative to formative. This change helps both teachers and students determine their skills as they go through the materials, rather than waiting until the end of a section. Students can not progress until they demonstrate clear skills on a weekly basis, for example. For me, assessment is the most significant difference between undergraduate and graduate school. As an undergraduate, most classes had a midterm and final, summative assessments. In smaller classes, and especially graduate school, I experience more formative assessments, like weekly quizzes. These help me stay prepared for class and monitor my own progress. Embedding formative assessment in standardized tests is challenging. However, with recent developments in adaptive assessment, such as systems that can modify their questions based on student responses, may help to push formative assessment forward on a more standardized level.