Why analyze student work

Silent observation 4 minutes : After reading the task, have your peers examine the student work silently, and ask themselves: How would I respond to the task? How did students respond? How do we assess students on this task? What is a high-quality response to this task? What do I notice and wonder about the student work?

To guide the discussion, Jeff Heyck-Williams, the director of curriculum and instruction, suggests answering the following questions: What does the student work tell me about student learning and thinking? In general, at what stage are students in their understanding with the content? What are next steps for teaching these students?

What opportunities do they need to move their understanding and thinking from beginning to advanced? Is there a student or a group of students that have only basic or novice understanding? If so, what reteaching or scaffolding needs to occur? To do this well, we must be mindful of what we are in the habit of doing as teachers. When we look at student work, it is far easier for us to focus on what is missing than what is there. Naturally, we see every computation error, incomplete thought, flawed procedure, spelling error, or grammatical mistake.

We need to override this tendency by asking ourselves, what does the work show that the student has learned and can do? Look beneath the surface. Consider the ideas behind the work and remember that creation in any subject is a proxy for thinking and learning. We need to think about student work as representing unconscious or conscious decisions about what should be and ask ourselves what has informed those decisions.

Ask questions. Even though we approach the analysis of student work to address specific needs and purposes, the work can raise questions that yield valuable and often surprising insights about the relationship between teaching and learning.

What led this student to approach this mathematics problem this way? Why are the transitions so uneven? How did the student come up with a wrong answer while following a reasonable logical process? How come the student can extract data from charts but not from tables? How similar is the quality of the writing in social studies? What is the relationship between what the student produced and the question his teachers asked him to consider?

Beyond the analysis Quality deserves to be captured. It also highlighted areas of caution around how beginning pre-service teachers might make use of evidence. This study contributes to the existing literature around noticing student thinking in written work by highlighting the significance of reasoning through self-comparison. Reasoning about student written work through self-comparison : how pre-service secondary teachers use their own solutions to analyze student work.

The research for this paper was conducted at as part of a dissertation study at Stanford University, and was supported in part by a Stanford Graduate School of Education Dissertation Support Grant. N2 - Analyzing and interpreting student thinking through written work is a key, often challenging, practice of teaching.

AB - Analyzing and interpreting student thinking through written work is a key, often challenging, practice of teaching. Reasoning about student written work through self-comparison: how pre-service secondary teachers use their own solutions to analyze student work.

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