Educational Leadership - September 2015

student who seemed to understand
what adverbs were thought the sen-
tence had only one—unsuccessfully. I
asked him whether well was an adverb,
and he said it wasn’t because “Fred
might have been sick yesterday.”
No matter how well we design our
questions, students will sometimes get
them right for the wrong reasons and
get them wrong for the right reasons.

It’s important to be sensitive to such possibilities.

Multiple correct answers also enable teachers to build a degree of challenge into their questions to stretch higher-achieving students. For example, a mathematics teacher asked a class of

7th graders to find the area of the fol-
lowing semicircle:
The students were given the fol-
lowing options from which to choose:
The first two options correspond to
well-known student errors, whereas
the last three are all correct. However,
it’s far more challenging for students
to recognize that D is correct than to
recognize that options C and E are
correct. As long as the easiest options
represent the minimum level of
achievement needed to move on, then
a single question can give the teacher
the information he or she needs to
make that decision as well as keep the
highest-achieving students on their
toes.

Well Worth the Time

Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) have pointed out, “The aim of all instruction is to alter long-term memory. If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned” (p. 77). Now, the fact that students know something today doesn’t mean they’ll know it next week, but if they don’t know it today, it’s highly unlikely they’ll know it next week. That’s why checking for understanding in a planned way, by using hinge questions, is so valuable.

Every day, teachers typically make dozens of decisions about what to do next in group instruction, and it’s simply not possible to plan a hinge question for each decision. But by planning at least a few questions carefully, teachers can get better-quality evidence about what their students can and can’t do in time to do something about it.

Designing good hinge questions is usually harder than teachers imagine.

I’ve found that groups of teachers typi-
cally take more than an hour to design
one good question. But the benefits of
doing so are huge. It means that you
can find out what’s going wrong with
students’ learning when they’re right
in front of you and that you can put
the whole class’s learning back on
track right away. If you don’t have this
opportunity, then you’ll have to wait
until you grade their work. And then,
long after the students have left the
classroom, you’ll have to try to get
their learning back on track, in
writing, one student at a time. EL

References

Hill, H. C., Rowan, B., & Ball, D. L.
(2005). Effects of teachers’ mathematical
knowledge for teaching on student
achievement. American Educational
Research Journal, 42( 2), 371–406.
Hunter, M. C. (1982). Mastery teaching. El
Segundo, CA: Tip Publications.
Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E.
(2006). Why minimal guidance during
instruction does not work: An analysis
of the failure of constructivist, problem-
based, experiential, and inquiry-based
teaching. Educational Psychologist,

41( 2), 75–86.

Osborne, J. (2011, February 11). Why
assessment matters. Paper presented
at the annual conference of SCORE
(Science Community Representing Edu-
cation), London, UK. Retrieved from
www.score-education.org/media/6606/
purposejo.pdf
Sadler, P. M. (1998). Psychometric models
of student conceptions in science:
Reconciling qualitative studies and
distractor-driven assessment instru-
ments. Journal of Research in Science
Teaching, 35( 3), 265–296.

Shulman, L. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15( 1), 4–14.

Dylan Wiliam (dylanwiliam@mac .com) is emeritus professor of educational assessment at University College London. His most recent book is Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical Techniques for K– 12 Classrooms (Learning Sciences International, 2015).