Learning and Life Skills

Summertime the perfect time to maximize critical thinking training

Sandee — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:14:18 PDT

Many parents share with me that their number one challenge is trying to determine how to fit training in critical thinking into their already overloaded schedule. I recommend several techniques for doing that during the 'normal' school year. However, the summer months provide opportunities to focus on these important skills while at the same time providing variety to the student.

Here are a couple of ideas for getting some focused critical thinking worked into summer and a couple of recommended resources I think work really well for summer enrichment.

If your students have never worked with the Building Thinking Skills series, now is a perfect time to begin. This would be my top recommendation to you. In as little as 30 minutes per day, your student can work through a substantial portion of the book or software and build cognitive skills that will support learning throughout the rest of the year. The Building Thinking Skills resources are unique in their format and the type and variety of skills that are taught. Your student likely will not have been exposed to most of the types of exercises found in this series.
Identify one area of your student's weakness and focus all efforts on that component using resources which challenge while building critical thinking skills. Important for future learning and ultimately, college entrance exams, are the following skills: reading comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, and mathematical reasoning. My top recommendations for each of these areas, respectively are: Reading Detective, Editor in Chief, Word Roots, and the Mathematical Reasoning series. Choose just one area for focus, if time is hard to commit during the summer months.
Choose an assortment of fun resources that can be worked by the entire family after dinner, taken in the car when traveling on vacation, or introduced as 'group brain fun' when friends are at the house. I'm able to get a few activities worked with my son's friends by negotiating a trade-off between 'gaming time' and 'brain time'. For every hour he and friends play computer games, they need to spend one-half hour moving their brains, and one-half hour outside moving their bodies. Yes, there is the anticipated moaning and groaning, but only until the challenge of the riddle, puzzle, logic matrix, or red herring is laid out in front of them. Then, they rise to the challenge - carrying their competitiveness and analytical skills from the gaming world into the world of critical thinking. Some of my favorites for these activities: Creative Thinking Puzzlers, Think a Minutes, Red Herrings Mysteries, and Mind Benders.
Schedule a "Critical Thinking Day" - Sometimes, the real challenge for homeschooling parents is to have a set time for introducing and supporting our students as they work critical thinking activities. Because these require deeper work and more thoughtfulness, having a parent present or readily available is a key component to our student's willingness to stick with the activity. That requires us to set aside other distractions and devote ourselves to making the most of these activities. I've found that one approach is to dedicate an entire day to the resources I want my son to work through. Once we are both focused on the activities for a large block of time, we have found that we can get much more done. I use this approach during the school year to provide a pace change every couple of weeks.
If you are a parent of an upper-middle school or high school student, you might consider putting together a group of students to work through a formal course in critical thinking. I've taught a small class of students using the course: Critical Thinking. This course is designed to be discussion-based with a group of students. The parent serves as moderator, instructor, and devil's advocate to stir discussion and thought. Summer months may provide the time and opportunity to start the group and then decide whether to keep it together once Fall arrives.

I hope these are helpful ideas for your family. If you implement any of them, I'd love to hear from you.

Classroom tests - how parents can utilize them to help their students

Sandee — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:04:31 PST

After graded homework, classroom tests offer the next best piece of information for a parent to use to assess how well their child is doing in a particular classroom, with particular content, and with a particular teacher.

We have all had personal experience with this type of test. They are either developed by the classroom teacher or the publisher/author of the particular curriculum/textbook being used, and administered throughout the year. They are composed of a variety of types of questions: multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, true-false, matching, definitions, and the dreaded - essay question. Their purpose is to assess understanding and mastery of content in a particular subject content as of a particular point in time. Tests may be chapter specific, or cumulative for the mid-term or semester. When used in a conventional school setting, the test scores serve as a basis for computing a class grade for each student.

Even if your student is scoring well and carries a high grade, there is still a lot of learning and understanding that can be done through the evaluation of the test results. This is an opportunity to look for patterns of errors within the tests. Try not to overlook your student's strengths, and make sure that the strength you acknowledge is more specific than the 'good' grade.

What to look for? I look first to see if I can find a pattern in the problems missed. Did the student answer the question completely? On a mathematics test, my son misses the problem if he doesn't put the units measure down as part of his answer. I usually look at him and say something like, "Is this 10 giraffes, onions, yards?" We smile about it, but the problem is still wrong. That missed problem is categorized as "Units missing".

When there are two parts to the question, there should be two answers. This is another time where students commonly miss points. If your student can write on the test document given to them, teach him to circle key words in the question, and to number the parts. Then, coach him to write his answer numbered in correspondence with the test question. When my son misses a multi-part problem in his homework or on a test, I classify that error as "Incomplete Answer".

By working with your student when looking over the test, you can get a feel for which questions the student answered but didn't know. These I classify as "Knowledge". It tells me that there needs to be more studying, or that we need to catch this lack of understanding through the homework assignments, rather than at chapter testing time. If we have a lot of 'knowledge' errors, we review in more detail how the student prepared for the test, and talk about ways that we might improve his study process.

In mathematics, there is also an additional category, "Computation". This classification tells me that my student understood how to approach the problem - had the knowledge - gave a complete answer, but a wrong answer - because he made an error in the computation. The answer is still wrong, but my concern is less. I communicate to him that I'm concerned he miscalculated, but I can see that he understood how to approach and solve the problem. I emphasize that knowing how to solve the problem is the main issue. Then, I stress how important it is to take care to do the computation accurately.

After we have looked over all the questions from test, I look at the number items by category and analyze what that tells me. Do I have a student whose test grade has resulted not from a lack of understanding, but from a series of computational mistakes? Or, do I have a majority of "knowledge" items. How we strategize improving his results on the next tests, has everything to do with understanding what is going wrong right now. More importantly, the student needs to understand his test taking and study habits for himself, and learn to do this kind of analysis on his own. As a younger student, we talked about what methods he could employ to increase his 'knowledge' leading up to a test. Emphasizing how his grade was lowered because of computational errors or a failure to answer the whole test question, helps make him more aware during the next test.

If you begin encouraging this kind of attention to detail with classroom testing, you'll find that the student improves in the long run and develops much better test taking habits. As a parent, though, you are doing so much more. You are communicating that you want to understand at a deep level, more than just the grade. Rather than taking the easy way out and giving your student the "You'll have to study harder." feedback, you are communicating and demonstrating that you are trying to understand his abilities and understanding at a deeper level, modelling how he can understand to the same thing independent of you.

What methods have you employed to help your student understand his test results?

Testing for homeschoolers - a few thoughts on the benefits

Sandee — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 07:53:44 PST

For many of us who homeschool, we test because we must. It is required by our state's law. In Minnesota, where we reside, the law requires that every homeschooled student be administered a nationally norm-referenced, standardized test on an annual basis.
Whether testing is an optional requirement in your state or required by law, I've put together a list of possible benefits to testing for you to consider:

1) They build experience. Assessment testing builds experience for upcoming college entrance exams. There's no escaping testing for the college bound student. It is a fact of life. The one perceived 'objective' measure used in the college admissions process is the test score. Each year your student takes an achievement test he/she is practicing test-taking skills. When the big moment comes to take the SAT or ACT, these high-stakes test won't hold as much mystery, and hopefully, he will have learned how to prepare and to manage himself when taking these types of tests.

2) They provide valuable planning information. Testing is a tool that can assist home educating parents in planning curriculum for the upcoming year or summer month remediation. I tend to see the test results as just one piece of the myriad of information that informs my decisions as to the curriculum or content emphasis for the upcoming year. As a high school student, our son is intimately involved in the evaluation of his test scores and in planning his upcoming year. He can see for himself that more time needs to be spent in honing his grammatical skills, for example. His involvement significantly reduces the amount of persuasion needed to convince him to invest some time in a 'less than favorite' content area.

4) They provide feedback about learning in the homeschool. Most of us have experienced those moments of doubt when we ask ourselves - are we doing the right thing ..or ..is my child learning enough and at the right pace? Testing can provide you with one set of information and feedback to gauge whether your student is on track when compared with other students nationally. Happily, most testing results in very positive feedback, confirming that the curriculum and time invested are paying off.

5) They provide measures needed for high ability students. When considering high ability students, using instruments that have high ceilings, such as the SAT or ACT for 7th/8th graders, provide a better measure of a student's achievement level and can be used to help your student qualify for Regional Talent Search programs. If qualified, these Talent Search programs give your student access to special camps, online advanced courses, as well as academic and career guidance. Test results, reflecting high achievement in a content area, indicate the possible need to move a student deeper into that area, to assess whether the curriculum being used is adequately challenging for your student, or to motivate a decision to accelerate the student's grade level in that area.

6) They can provide an indication of the existence of learning difficulties. Testing sometimes provides the first objective feedback that a home educating student may have learning exceptionalities and is in need of additional support, remediation, or intervention with a specialist.

The bottom line is that testing should be done to meet state law, when required, but primarily to answer questions like these:
How well has my student learned the content for his/her grade level? How does my student compare to other students at the same grade level? What are the areas of weaker scores? Do I need to consider different curriculum in order to address this content area better? What are the areas of high scores? Do the scores indicate that we could be moving at a faster pace? Does the curriculum I'm currently using appropriately challenge my student in his/her area of strength? Has the student gained or lost ground in a content area when compared year to year? In what ways will our curriculum plans change as a result of information we have gained through testing?
Did I miss anything? Do you see the same benefits? How do you use testing to benefit your home school?