We all want our students to learn to think! Yet most educational materials are not designed to teach thinking skills. They are content-based, developed to accomplish specific learning outcomes, with summative testing components for the purpose of determining each student’s grade.
The reality of today’s schools is that content knowledge and grading are usually required. However, many curricula overlook thinking skills by focusing on having students memorize a body of information that’s soon forgotten.
Thinking skills include, for example, the ability to strategize—to decide which method to use and to know how to apply that method to reach a goal or solve a problem. Strategizing requires analysis, another thinking skill, to contemplate the appropriate methodology. Associated with this process is hypothesizing, or making a logical guess regarding the outcome of applying a specific strategy. Evaluation, another form of thinking skills, surfaces when one looks at the results, and evaluation, when done correctly, allows for generalization, or using knowledge of one element to hypothesize about another.
What’s so important about learning thinking skills? Thinking skills are life skills central to our democracy. They are the skills that are necessary to remain competitive in today’s world.
Can content teaching and thinking skills be combined in a curriculum? Arthur Costa, an Emeritus Professor at California State University and the author of Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking (ASCD, 2001), is an advocate of this approach. He knows that the results have been disappointing when programs attempt to teach content in isolation. Likewise, Costa warns, teaching thinking segregated from content doesn’t work well, either.
Teaching content in isolation is like memorizing the spelling of a hundred words that end in the suffix ing—letter by letter. Teaching content combined with thinking skills means guiding students to discover how ing can be added to the ends of various base words. Then students can apply the strategy to spell many ing-ending words. Content and thinking skills unite in this instructional model.
Summative assessment is illustrated by a Friday Test of spelling words to determine whether students have studied the specific test words and can spell the words on test day. Its purpose is to evaluate student performance, or grade students. It is a summation of students’ spelling ability at the end of a spelling unit.
Another kind of assessment is formative. Although formative assessment can evaluate student performance for grading purposes, its primary purpose is to aid instruction. Formative testing gathers specific information about what students know and don’t know on a given topic. Teachers use the information to make instructional decisions to reach stated learning goals for that topic.
Formative assessment is illustrated by giving a spelling test of words that students need to master to accomplish a predetermined learning goal. The test is given without students having studied the specific test words. The words students miss on the test provide feedback for further instruction and study to enable students to learn the spelling words that they have not yet mastered and to accomplish the stated spelling learning goal.
Learning goals are a key to student achievement. Only through formative, rather than summative, evaluations can teachers critically appraise where they are on the path toward reaching learning goals. Ongoing formative assessment is necessary, according to educators such as Mike Schmoker (Results Now: How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teaching and Reading, ASCD, 2006). Schmoker asserts that formative assessment is a basic element for improved instruction and increased achievement.
The Sitton Spelling and Word Skills™ Sourcebooks combine content and thinking skills and provide formative assessment options that are essential for giving teachers feedback to aid instruction that supports student mastery of words and skills. Combining content and thinking is the approach supported by research and thinking-skills advocate Dr. Costa. Formative assessment is supported by educators and organizations striving to improve instruction and student achievement.
To learn more about thinking skills, specifically using word analysis and student discovery of strategies via the Sourcebook pedagogy, review the November, 2008 Appleseed—download and print a word-analysis activity (Primary Activity and Upper-Grade Activity), get tips on using word-analysis (Sourcebook Teaching Tips: Make Use of Your Sourcebook Word-Skill Analysis Activities. Why?), and discover more about the benefits of strategy-building (What’s Current? What To Do When a Student Says: “I’m not a good speller.”). To learn more about formative testing using the Sourcebook approach to spelling and word-skill mastery, see the April, 2008 Appleseed (What’s Current? Why Does Summative Assessment Take a Backseat to Formative Assessment?).
Arthur Costa’s popular book, Developing Minds, a 2001 ASCD publication, is a worthwhile resource for thinking about thinking skills for teachers and administrators. Another ASCD professional book, Mike Schmoker’s Results Now, (2006) has become the gold standard for achievement results in today’s schools.