Blogs on Assessment

In the past five years, Response to Intervention (RtI) has become one of the most discussed, researched, and implemented educational improvement programs. The process -- which was originally designed to improve core curriculum and the interventions given to students whose needs were not being met by the core curriculum -- has been transformed into a cookie-cutter three-tier system. Furthermore, this over-simplified approach is now almost universally accepted, as evidenced by the model being displayed on the Pearson Assessment: Welcome to RtI Web page.

In "Collecting, Organizing, and Making Sense of Information," I suggested some tools and resources for helping you and your students collect and organize information. But, what do you do with it? In this post, I will present tools and resources that will help students synthesize information and create new things.

Editor's Note: John Larmer is the Director of Product Development at the Buck Institute for Education.

Many teachers and administrators -- not to mention the general public -- might have the wrong impression of PBL. Maybe they have stereotypical views of what a "project" is, or they've seen poor examples of it in the past. Or they can't imagine how it could fit in today's landscape of standards and testing ("Oh yeah, we did that in the 90's, but things were different then.")

Here are some common misconceptions and how you could respond with a "fact check" if you're trying to explain or defend PBL.

In 1986, Donna Ogle created KWL, a reading strategy that engages the students in the text or textbook and helps students analyze what they are reading. Students are asked to describe what they already know about the reading topic. Then they are asked to look at the title, the introduction and the pictures and determine what they want to know more of, in essence to determine why they should continue reading the literature.