Element 12

Desired Effect

Students accurately record and represent knowledge creating a variety of artifacts which organize and summarize the critical content..

Purpose

• Having students record and represent their knowledge is a crucial and powerful step and should not be thought of in isolation of the full learning cycle.
• Prior to recording, students must be given time to process, elaborate, and summarize their learning. Then students should correctly record or represent their knowledge.
• When using a linguistic or non-linguistic strategy, they are then summarizing their own learning.

This summarization is crucial as it is often a prerequisite to the next chunk of new content to be learned. Reviewing a student's written or visual summarization can also be a powerful formative assessment that allows the teacher to address learning gaps before moving on to the next chunk of new content.

• As students work through processing activities and refine their understanding of new content, linguistic and non-linguistic tasks contribute to the learning journey.
  • Linguistic activities should be interactive in nature with changes and additions made as students process the content. For example, students can take their own notes and then compare with others to identify similarities and differences.
  • Non-linguistic activities require students to generate a representation of new information that does not rely on language. For example, a student can draw a diagram to represent a concept and explain it to a classmate.

It is important that when students are engaged in those tasks that they are recording their own understanding of the information rather than just repeating what the teacher provided.