Students will be able to make observations.
■ Students will be able to make measurements.
■ Students will understand what evidence is and be able to provide evidence.
■ Students will understand what weathering is and will be able to recognize the effects of weathering.
■ Students will understand what erosion is and be able to recognize erosion.
■ Students will understand how water, ice, and wind affect erosion.
■ Students will understand how vegetation affects erosion. (p. 108)
The teacher’s first tasks relative to this design area are to unpack the standard, identify what is essential, and organize the content into a proficiency scale. Such a scale for this standard appears in figure 1.3.
Figure 1.3: Scale for weathering and erosion at grade 4.
With the scale in place, the stage is set for students to track their progress. As figure 1.2 (page 14) shows, the student began with a score of 1.5, indicating partial success at score 2.0. By the end of the unit, the student achieved a score of 3.5, indicating success at score 2.0 and 3.0 content and partial success with score 4.0 content. The student gained two full points on the proficiency scale.
Implications for Change
The New Art and Science of Teaching is a framework for change. Indeed, each of the ten design areas has implications for substantive change. The change that providing and communicating clear learning goals and objectives implies is the manner in which educators view content. The prevailing view is that classroom content directly equates with standards. A teacher receives standards from the state or district. These standards represent the content to teach. Unfortunately, such a process is almost impossible to execute. A historical perspective provides evidence for this assertion.
The modern standards movement began in 1989 at the first Education Summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has continued to evolve. (For a discussion, see Marzano & Kendall, 1996.) Every state now has its own set of standards, which the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA & CCSSO], 2010a) and mathematics (NGA & CCSSO, 2010b) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) influence to some degree small or large.
After decades of evolution, one might think that standards in every subject area have been fine-tuned to a high degree of precision and focus. However, this is not the case. To illustrate, at the beginning of the 21st century, researchers estimated that it would take about 15,500 hours to teach all the standards identified for K–12 students, yet there were only about 9,000 hours of instructional time available to do so (see Marzano, 2007; Marzano & Kendall, 1996). In effect, it was impossible to teach the content in the standards in the time available.
The trend in the disparity between the amount of content the standards addressed and the time available to teach it persists. For example, Marzano, David C. Yanoski, Jan K. Hoegh, and Simms (2013) identify seventy-three standards statements for eighth-grade English language arts in the CCSS. As shown in the previous section, each of these standards contains a number of unique topics. Assuming an average of five topics per standards statement, there are 365 English language arts topics eighth-grade teachers are expected to address; obviously this is an impossible task within the confines of a 180-day school year.
Proficiency scales provide a solution to this problem. Individual teachers could take the initiative to unpack the standards they addressed in a unit and create one or more proficiency scales that focus on the important content. However, such a task is better addressed at the district level. That is, district curriculum experts working with teachers should create proficiency scales for each subject area at each grade level. Tammy Heflebower, Hoegh, and Phil Warrick (2014) articulate specific steps as to how a district might do this. Additionally, at Marzano Research, Julia Simms (2016) led a team identifying the essential topics (referred to as measurement topics) for English language arts, mathematics, and science. Figure 1.4 lists the topics for eighth-grade English language arts.
Source: Adapted from Simms, 2016.
Figure 1.4: Eighth-grade English language arts topics.
For each measurement topic, the team developed proficiency scales that districts and schools can customize by adding, altering, or deleting the text. To illustrate, figure 1.5 reports the proficiency scale for the topic of generating claims, evidence, and reasoning (GCER).
Figure 1.5: Critical concepts scale for generating claims, evidence, and reasoning at grade 8.
In all, about five-hundred proficiency scales like the one in figure 1.5 have been written for mathematics, English language arts, and science for grades K–12. This is a number that teachers could address in the time available. If district personnel wish to create their own, they should unpack their state standards and identify a small set of topics (fifteen to twenty-five) to focus on during instruction and assessment at each grade level for each content area. This rather straightforward effort solves a problem I believe is one of the most serious plaguing K–12 education: namely, a curriculum that is so bloated and cumbersome that it is impossible for teachers to teach well and, therefore, difficult for students to learn efficiently.
CHAPTER 2
Using Assessments
At its core, assessment is a feedback mechanism for students and teachers. Assessments should provide students with information about how to advance their understanding of content and teachers with information about how to help students do so.
The desired mental states and processes for assessment are that:
Students understand how test scores and grades relate to their status on the progression of knowledge they are expected to master.
To achieve these outcomes in students, there must be a transparent relationship between students’ scores on assessments and their progress on a proficiency scale. The following elements are important to effective assessment.
Element 4: Using Informal Assessments of the Whole Class
Informal assessments of the whole class provide a barometer of how the whole class is performing regarding the progression of knowledge articulated in a specific proficiency scale. Informal whole-class assessments typically don’t involve individual
