With one week of school under our belts, you may already have received communication from your child's teacher containing terms you'd like to know a little more about. Each of these will be central to the learning that takes place this year:
4Cs: These are the 21st century skills considered most important for K-12 education and for a student's future in the world of college, career, and citizenship. They are:
- critical thinking
- communication
- collaboration
- creativity
Performance Task: Performance-based assessment is an approach to the monitoring of students' progress in relationship to identified learner outcomes. This method of assessment requires the student to create answers or products which demonstrate his/her knowledge or skills. This differs from traditional testing methods which require a student to select a single correct answer or to fill in the blank.
Experts in the
field emphasize that any effective performance assessment task should
have the following features:
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Students should be active participants, not passive “selectors of the single right answer."
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Intended outcomes should be clearly identified and should guide the design of a performance task.
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Students should be expected to demonstrate mastery of those intended outcomes when responding to all facets of the task.
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Students must demonstrate their ability to apply their knowledge and skills to reality-based situations and scenarios.
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A clear, logical set of performance-based activities that students are expected to follow should be evident.
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A clearly presented set of criteria should be available to help judge the degree of proficiency in a student response.
Transfer
goals have several distinguishing characteristics:
- They require application (not simply recognition or recall).
- The application occurs in new situations (not ones previously taught or encountered; i.e., the task cannot be accomplished as a result of rote ‘plugging in’).
- The transfer requires a thoughtful assessment of which prior learning applies here – i.e. some strategic thinking is required (not simply following a recipe that is insensitive to context).
- The learners must apply their learning autonomously (on their own, without teacher prompting or support).
- Transfer calls for the use of habits of mind (i.e., good judgment, self regulation, persistence) along with academic understanding, knowledge and skill.
PBL (Project/Problem Based Learning): Project-based learning is a dynamic approach to teaching in which students explore real-world problems and challenges. With this type of active and engaged learning, students are inspired to obtain a deeper knowledge of the subjects they're studying. Watch a video on PBL here: http://www.edutopia.org/video/five-keys-rigorous-project-based-learning
In a problem-based learning (PBL) model, students engage complex, challenging problems and collaboratively work toward their resolution. PBL is about students connecting disciplinary knowledge to real-world problems—the motivation to solve a problem becomes the motivation to learn.
