In our world it is imperative that students develop skills to determine what they need to do, how they will achieve it and how to extend their learning. It does not matter what career a student embarks upon, learning will be consistent throughout their life. Therefore being able to understand how to achieve in their learning and determine the next steps to achieve success, will be an important skill. It means students learn autonomy, independence and interdependence. 

It is important for students to understand what they are learning. This is not a focus on the task(s) but the actual learning they are undertaking. Each lesson the teacher unpacks the Learning Intention which emphasises the learning the student will be engaging in. Further to this, students need to know how to successfully achieve the learning intention. Therefore, students have a success criteria given to them by the teacher or co constructed with the student(s). The Success Criteria enables students to gauge where they are, how they are going with the learning and an indication of where they need to go. 

The following questions exist in the framework of lessons:

Where am I going? (the Learning Intention)

How am I going? (the Success Criteria)

Where to next? (student evaluation against the Success Criteria)

This graph indicates the extent that student self efficacy affects a student’s ability to learn. 0.8 is a significant effect size as from 0.4 the effect size is the desired maximal learning zone. 

Example of Learning Intention and Success Criteria:

SUCCESS CRITERIA

The purpose of the success criteria or “What we are looking for” is to make students absolutely sure about what is in the teacher’s mind as the criteria for evaluating their learning. Success criteria lets students know what the destination for learnning looks like. They “signal the learner about the destination and provide a road map for how they will get there. Further, the criteria empowers learners to assess their own progress and to not be overly dependent on an outside agent (their teacher) to notice when they have arrived” at the Learning Intention.

Ideally, success criteria also consider challenge by being focused on surface, deep, and transfer levels of learning; supported by examples and models of what the learning will look like; and co-constructed where possible with students so the criteria are clearly understood by them. Example above. 

LEARNING INTENTIONS

Learning Intentions are the learning goals set for students:

There are several reasons why these work so well. First, stated learning intentions have a priming effect on learners. They signal to the student what the purpose is for learning and prevent students from just being compliant (which does not equate to learning). A second reason why learning intentions are so effective is that they allow students to see the relationship between the tasks they are completing and the purpose for learning. Students need to understand that a particular maths activity is for the purpose of building conceptual understanding, or that the assigned reading is to build the background knowledge they’ll need for the lab experiment they’ll soon be completing. 

The Learning Intention of any lesson needs to be a combination of surface, deep, or conceptual, with the exact combination depending on the decision of the teacher, which in turn is based on how the lesson fits into the curriculum. Good learning intentions, whether they be short-term (for a lesson or part of a lesson) or long-term (over a series of lessons), make clear to the students the level of performance that they need to attain, so that they “understand where and when to invest energies, strategies, and thinking, and where they are positioned along the trajectory towards successful learning.

EXAMPLES OF EFFECTIVE LEARNING INTENTIONS:

We are learning about narrative texts (knowledge). 

We are learning about the impact of conflict (concept). 

We are learning to express one quantity as a fraction or percentage of the other (skill). 

We are learning to persist when learning becomes difficult (disposition).

The graph above highlights the significant impact Learning Intentions have for student learning achievement. 

Ask your child what their learning intentions were today!

 FEEDBACK

In 2021, students will receive feedback shared with their parent’s via Compass throughout each term. The feedback will emphasize and encourage each student to apply their feedback in order to improve through the year. In turn, students will have the opportunity to demonstrate improvement based on feedback. 

As we know, feedback is one of the most powerful factors relating to learning and achievement. The not-so-good news is that the variability of feedback is huge—certain types of feedback are more effective than others. Effective feedback closes the gap between a student’s current performance and the desired performance they are trying to reach.

Three key levels of effective feedback:

1. Feedback can be about a task or product, such as whether work is correct or incorrect. Feedback at this level may include directions to add, delete, or correct information.
2. Feedback can also be aimed at the process used to create a product or complete a task. Process feedback targets “how” learners have processed information or how the learning processes are used to complete the activity.
3. Finally, feedback to students can be focused at the self-regulation level, including greater skill in self-evaluation, such as using success criteria as a checklist of their performance. This can have a major influence on self-efficacy and self-regulatory proficiencies, in that students are encouraged or informed how to better and more effortlessly continue on the task.

Praise is often given in lieu of, or in addition to, feedback: this is information based on the person and not the task being performed. Therefore, it is not considered feedback, nor should it be included in the feedback process.

To aid in giving feedback at the right level, the reminder prompt is intended for self-regulated feedback, for students who simply need to elaborate, extend, or solve; the scaffolded prompt is for those who need some suggestions on the processes or content to use; and the example prompt is for students who need improvement explicitly modeled.  Interestingly, teachers found that giving example prompts mostly led to students making up their own sentence rather than simply copying any of the examples given.