One of the powerful aspects of strategies that work is how they connect to the ways humans learn. John Hattie (Visible Learning, 2009) says the following:
“Learning progressions ensure that appropriately higher expectations of challenges are provided to students…there is not one right trajectory of progress for all students.
Instead, it is more critical to analyse closely how students progress….there is also the question of how to move each student forward from wherever they start through these levels of achievement….”
The money quote here is, “There is not one right trajectory of progress for all students.” Educational research clearly shows that choice leads to more confident, capable, and interested students. The classic article “Choices for Children” (Alfie Kohn) cites relevant findings that include:
Giving students choice in learning tasks led to greater task completion in less time.
Students asked to write up chemistry problems without step-by-step instructions completed better write-ups. What’s more, they remembered the material better. This is no surprise given generative note-taking (d=.51) research.
Put in a simple way, student choice, when implemented in the right way, works. Choice boards are one way to do it right.
