Stairway to Heaven (aka Learning is NOT Linear)

In a recent Education Week editorial, Patrick Mattimore, an AP psychology teacher in San Francisco, argued for national standards and a single set of national tests for use under a reauthorized NCLB.  Among several pieces of faulty logic in his argument is this statement: 'Learning proceeds hierarchically. Learning at the highest levels depends on students having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels.'

Intuitive as this statement may appear, it is in practice not true. In fact, students are quite capable of thinking and learning at what we would consider the "highest levels" (think: Bloom's or other taxonomies), while having significant gaps in what is traditionally considered "lower level" skills. Even more common, students with a solid grasp of lower level facts and skills often falter when faced with higher level cognitive demands or situations. 

For example: As a secondary English teacher I have taught many students who came from the elementary level with great word attack skills (phonics, phonemic awareness, not to mention flawless articulation) yet struggled with even the most basic comprehension of text.

On the other hand, I've had many more students who could not pronounce many of the grade level words they saw on a page or spell them if asked, but could share profound interpretation and application of the concepts behind those words during class discussions.

As a teacher of writing, I have watched many students at both secondary and collegiate level seemingly lose control of basic writing skills as they explore new genres or topics. Later, as they grow more comfortable with their ideas and the stylistic issues, the basic writing issues disappear.

These observations are supported in the research on learning. Which is why I so dislike grade levels and the crippling (to students) notion that each child can or should learn exactly the same pre-packaged blocks of knowledge at pre-set age levels.

No, real learning and real teaching is more of a spiral; sometimes appearing to swirl downwards before it soars upward. That's why our methods of measurement have to be more sophisticated and varied. Having flexible, mutliple measures is not the same as having no measures or standards at all. As education professionals, we should be able to understand and explain the differences.

Comments

[Nancy Flanagan]

Excellent post, Renee. There's been a dialogue over at "Teaching in the 408" around the very subject of whether students need to be remediated before they can move on to benefit from challenging curriculum. Any time students have to jump through hoops before they get to the curricular goodies, we're make assumptions about students' capacity to learn, the order in which things must be learned, and the relative importance of certain subjects and skills.

You said it best--learning is messy and unpredictable.

[Marsha]

Respectfully Renee, I think I disagree. Maybe it's possible in other areas of school but it hasn't been the case in what I teach. In my disciplines, it takes a solid set of baseline knowledge and/or experiences in order to make that leap to generalizing.

My examples of this would be when I try to get my students to see patterns for multiples. Students that easily know their times table are able to see the patterns within the structure of a 100s table. Granted any student could figure out that every other box is colored in with multiples of 2, but the emergence of the pattern only hits home when they know all their facts. I used to think that the coloring process could help them learn the times table...and it does in some isolated cases....but most often it is the knowledge of the specific that leads them to generalize and find the pattern. Not the other way around.

Which brings me to science. My example from science is taken from where I am working right now. I first taught students all about convection currents with a variety of hands-on activities. Then we generalized that process to the earth. Quickly students "got" that the plates of the earth move just like the drop of food coloring in the water bath. I have tried and tried for years to get kids to really see, not just that we have plates, but that they move because of this great energy source deep inside the earth. Only when I went back and taught the underlying idea of convections currents in a more basic, simplized (how's that for a word!!!) fashion, could they see how earth's plates work.

I don't see how students, and I'd freely admit there is always those rare exceptions to the case, can think more globally or in a generalization of specific cases without those basics

[TeachMoore]

Marsha,
I certainly respect your observations, and many of my math and science colleagues concur. Perhaps, what I'm describing is more content particular (to composition and the humanities). For example, I have had many students who have proficiency in grammar, spelling, punctuation, but whose writing is unclear, illogical, redundant, and otherwise weak. More important, I've had many for whom the exact opposite was true. What I'm suggesting is that perhaps there are multiple pathways to at least some educational goals for different children, and that we need to explore that more systematically at the classroom level.

[Patrick Mattimore]

Renee,
Admittedly, the statement I made in the Ed Week op-ed was a bit of an oversimplification (a hazard of that type of writing). However, as a general proposition I do believe (and I think this comes straight from Bloom's Taxonomy which you cite) that kids need the basics in order to conduct intelligent (non-Jerry Springer "I Feel") debates. I think we've given short shrift to multiple choice type tests for the largely politically correct reason that we want all our kids to succeed. Well, all our kids ain't succeeding and rather than construct more elaborate tests to try and convince ourselves that they are, we should arrive at agreed upon measures of what we want kids to know and construct a single battery of tests to measure it. Are there kids who are outliers with extraordinary abilities that our testing will misidentify? Sure. But what we should be pointing towards is a unitary measure that tells us about is how we are doing educating the vast majority, rather than muddying the assessment picture even more. IMHO multiple measures allow us to excuse poor performance.

[Patrick Mattimore]

Sorry, for the typo in my previous post. Next to last sentence should read: "But what we should be pointing towards is a unitary measure that tells us how we are doing educating the vast majority, rather than muddying the assessment picture even more.

[Camila]

Could it be that the call for a mutliple assessment measure is just too reasonable and sensical? Doesn't standard convention and wisdom point to the fact that we all do NOT learn the same? So, why should we be tested the same? Can't we (adults and children) be tested according our 'intellegencies' (as per Gardner)?