Tips for Parents: Are Your Student's Assignments On Grade-Level?

Students can do no better than the assignments they are given.

This mantra lies at the heart of teaching. Teacher assignments and instruction are the vehicles through which knowledge is or is not transmitted to students. In working through an assignment, students apply, wrestle with, and consolidate their knowledge. Simply put, students won’t learn information and skills they are not asked to learn in order to complete their assignments.

After analyzing thousands of assignments teachers have given their students over the last ten years, I have uncovered the nasty fact that there are blatant inequities in the availability and distribution of knowledge among students in classrooms and schools. Teachers’ assignments provide insight into why and how students fall behind and stay behind.

Let’s look at an example of a 10^th grade history/geography assignment. The following task appeared on an end-of-unit test in a south Florida public high school, the unit being the Age of Discovery. There were no other geography questions on the test. The steps we are going to go through here are a modified version of the first three (of six) steps of the FLEX Team analysis I developed to use with teachers.

Assignment: Draw a map of the Caribbean, labeling major cities and geologic features.

STEP 1: First, let’s look at the teacher’s purpose in asking the questions. What is the academic purpose of this assignment?

• Know general shapes of the Caribbean islands, major cities and geologic features

STEP 2: Once the teacher purpose is established in step one, let’s look at what a person would need to know and be able to do to complete the task successfully?

• Basic recall, no analysis
• Memorize the islands, major cities, and basic geologic feature
• Don’t even need to know where the Caribbean is in order to fulfill expectations.

STEP 3: Now let’s identify the standards that apply to this assignment. Unfortunately, the benchmark that best fits the 10^th grade assignment above is the grade 2 benchmark (2002 Sunshine State Standards [Florida]):

• use simple maps, globes, and other three-dimensional models to identify and locate places.

Wow! That’s certainly not what we want, an eight grade gap between what students should be asked to know and do and what they are being asked to know and do! In order to fix that, let’s look at two of the Florida geography benchmarks for 10th grade:

• use a variety of maps, geographic technologies including geographic information systems (GIS) and satellite-produced imagery, and other advanced graphic representations to depict geographic problems.
• understand the advantages and disadvantages of using maps from different sources and different points of view.

As you can see, the 10^th grade standards require that students analyze information and figure out how to apply knowledge to a complex situation. They still need to know facts, but then they are asked to show the relationship between them, to analyze. With this in mind, we can rewrite the assignment to address the second of the 10^th grade geography standards, focusing on those geographic issues that were important during the age of discovery.

Revised Assignment: How does Mercator’s 1633 map of the New World differ from Kircher’s 1665 map? If you were going to sail from Europe to the New World, which map would you use and why?

STEP 1: Again, let’s look at the teacher’s purpose in asking the question. What is the academic purpose of this assignment?

• Analysis of information, written proposition-support response
• Mercator’s projection and its purpose
• Kirtcher’s projection and its purpose

STEP 2: Now, what would a person need to know and be able to do to complete the task successfully?

• Analysis of information, written proposition-support response
• Understand the navigation technology used by the explorers and its limitations
• Mercator’s projection and its purpose
• Kirtcher’s projection and its purpose
• Where explorers generally started, where they ended up

STEP 3: Now let’s identify the standards that apply to this revised assignment. We wrote the assignment to specifically address the second of the 10^th grade geography standards but we will also need a writing standard to help focus students on the organization of the response (2002 Sunshine State Standards [Florida]).

• understand the advantages and disadvantages of using maps from different sources and different points of view. (Geography)
• uses an effective organizational pattern (in this case proposition-support) and substantial support to achieve a sense of completeness or wholeness (for example, considering audience, sequencing events/ideas, choosing effective vocabulary, using specific details to clarify meaning). (English Language Arts)

By examining assignments in this way, establishing what was expected and what background knowledge is required to complete the assignment, we are able to establish how rigorous the expectations are. Then, just for good measure, we compare the assignment to the standards for that grade. If there is no match, we have to rethink the assignment. For more examples of FLEX Team analysis, click here.

But now the question is, how do we teach all kids to successfully answer these rigorous, grade appropriate questions? Instruction. "Students can do no better than the assignments they are given," may be our mantra, but it is only half of what needs to happen. "Students can do no better than the assignments they are given AND the instruction they receive." In my next post, I’ll talk about what rigorous instruction looks like, but in the meantime think about what it would take to instruct kids to be successful on the assignment we started with and what it would take to instruct kids to be successful on the assignment we ended up with.