The transition from high school to college can be difficult for students. Students have more independence and more independence is expected from them. In particular, there is much less face time in college classes, and students are expected to make sense of material on their own, outside of class. During the initial brainstorming sessions for this Successful Transitions project, all of the workgroups expressed a concern for how students were developing as independent learners. These working groups then developed interventions designed to either foster skills or attitudes that would in some way help students progress toward more independence.
To measure independence, our cohort began work on an observation protocol. We were curious to identify how much students rely on the teacher as a source of knowledge in the classroom, and how much the teacher promotes a culture independence vs. a culture in which all knowledge comes from them. In particular, we wondered, when students are stuck on a problem, do they stop work and wait for the teacher to help them, or do they turn to other resources, such as classmates, notes, or calculator?
In response to this question, our cohort developed an observation protocol to measure how often student used resources other than the teacher in learning, both with and without a prompt from the teacher. We also measured the teacher’s contribution to the classroom culture of independence: How often the teacher encouraged students to use other resources, vs. how often the teacher acted as the source of knowledge. Unlike more general observation protocols designed to evaluate a teacher as a whole, the protocol proposed in this paper is narrowly focused to a singular question of classroom culture: How to measure students using resources other than the teacher (with or without a prompt)?
The tool is designed to be used by instructors who are interested in measuring the independence of students’ in their classrooms, or to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction designed to foster student independence. Because the Successful Transitions project involves both Mathematics and English/Language Arts instructors, the design of the observation protocol is intentionally content agnostic, focusing only on student independence.
The basic structure of the protocol involves an external observer attending class and recording observed behaviors in an iPad app or on a paper form. The exact categories of behaviors to be observed have changed over several design iterations of the observation protocol. In this paper, we describe the design history of the tool, why changes were made, and the current form of the tool.
Common Core State Standards
The Standards for Mathematical Practice expect that educators at all levels bring about attributes in all students around important “processes and proficiencies.” Notably at the heart of the practice standards is student ownership.
MP.1 states “Mathematically proficient students start by explaining to themselves the meaning of a problem and looking for entry points to its solution. They analyze… They make conjectures… They consider analogous problems… They monitor and evaluate…” MP.6 expects “Mathematically proficient students consider the available tools when solving a mathematical problem…are sufficiently familiar with tools appropriate for their grade…make sound decisions about when each of these tools might be helpful…”
This type of student ownership surfaced as a central theme in problems of practice found by most cohorts in this project. Our cohort chose to develop the Culture of Student Independence (COSI) observation protocol to measure student and teacher actions.
