According to Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, and Malenoski "reinforcing effort enhances students' understanding of the relationship between effort and achievement by addressing their attitudes and beliefs about learning" (2007). My students can easily see how they compare to others when using this website. Another way my students make the connection between effort and achievement is through the use of rubrics in writing. The Rubistar website has allowed me to create rubrics so the children can see what is expected of them to achieve a certain grade.
Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn and Malenoski also suggested "a way to convince students that effort is tied to achievement is by showing them data" (2007). I keep all my grades on a program called PowerTeacher Gradebook. The students could easily keep track of how much time they spent studying for a particular assignment and then input the data into a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel. Although my district doesn't allow us to grade homework at the elementary level, data could be collected for effort studying for quizzes and tests.
Homework practice is also an example of behaviorist theory. When students complete homework and hand it in for corrections, the teacher is able to determine if more instruction is needed both individually or for the whole group (positive/negative reinforcement). Educational technology allows students to practice basic skills at home in an engaging, collaborative way. No longer are students limited to paper/pencil types of activities. 21st century students have the ability to practice skills and apply the content they've learned by using blogs, wikis and other programs. One tool that I thought would be particularly helpful is the spelling and grammar tool in Word. Students can use this software to find the grade-level of their writing. By determining the grade-level of one's writing, he/she can decide if words need revising to make the text more descriptive or if sentences need to be combined to make them more complex. Word even has an AutoSummarize tool! Autosummarize provides a brief summary of what was written so a student can compare it to his/her original purpose.
In conclusion, reinforcing effort and homework practice fit the criteria of behaviorist learning theory.
Reference:
Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Your post outlines several ways that the behaviorist approach is used in the classroom. This shows the prominent role played by behaviorism in pedagogy even though we also employ other learning approaches in the course of our lesson delivery.I had hitherto overlooked several ways that one could use Word apart from the regular word processing.That includes overlooking the very useful AutoSummarize function.It seems as if the usage of most of the available education technology tools in one way or the other involves use of the behaviorist learning approach.
ReplyDeleteKristen,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your suggestion of the academicskillbuilders.com website! This sounds like a game that my students would be really interested in, and I could see them playing it at home as well. My school system uses a program similar to your Power Teacher Gradebook, called Infinite Campus. The program is used to track attendance and grades for students, and it can be accessed by teachers, administrators, and parents. It is a great online tool for entering data for students in a place where they can access it to track their effort and see where they need to improve. I wish that Infinite Campus had a page dedicated to graphing data so that students could see where they compare to other students in the class. An idea for this problem might be to use a programs like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word to make grpahs of the students' performance averages and display it ona Smartboard for the students to see as you review the graded work. Best of luck as the school year comes to an end!
You mentioned that you use Rubistar to create rubrics for your students. Do you determine the criteria and scoring for the rubrics or do you allow your students to assist in the creation of the rubric? Over the past few years, my district has focused on using rubrics that have been created collaboratively. My students and I enjoy creating assignment rubrics and they produce better work when they help determine the grading criteria.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I also enjoyed learning about some of the features of Microsoft Word that I was unfamiliar with. I plan to find ways to implement these new tools into my lessons next school year.
What a great idea to have students help create the rubrics! First, they'd see how much time they take to create and second, they would most likely take more ownership of it, thus increasing the likelihood that they'll put for more effort on the assignment. Thanks for the tip!
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