Over the past few years there has been a great deal of interest in looking at education through the prism of learning and the brain and the ways mindset, memory, exercise, nutrition, “grit”, and motivation contribute to cognition. This has been or great interest to educators who are constantly searching for ways to help their students acquire knowledge and skills. The challenge, of course, is that what works for one student may not work for another. They way we educators tackle that monumental problem is that we differentiate.

Differentiating is one of the most difficult things teachers are asked to do and I am constantly on the lookout for ways to do it better. One way that might be of benefit to both teacher and student may be to give students a greater say with respect to not how they are presented information but also how they should be assessed. One of many methods teachers can employ is to provide students assessment choices via a Think-Tac-Toe framework of menus.

A Think-Tac-Toe matrix allows a teacher to design a menu of assessments through a multiple intelligences prism that will hopefully motivate the students to authentically engage with the material. Research on the connection between motivation and learning has focused on two types of mindsets that students develop, based on the kind of experiences (including assessments) we present them within school. Students tend to develop either performance-related goals or mastery goals.

 

Performance-related goals are those that are linked to more traditional types of assessments. Students become motivated by the grades they achieve, their rankings compared with other students, and extrinsic rewards such as honor rolls or school awards. In contrast, students who develop mastery goals are motivated by the actual learning experiences. Their rewards arise from the challenges of acquiring and applying new knowledge and skills.

An interesting study conducted by Carole Ames and Jennifer Archer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that

…interventions aimed at modifying attributions and training of learning strategies may not have lasting effects if the classroom does not support the targeted outcomes of the intervention. A mastery, but not performance, structure provides a context that is likely to foster long-term use of learning strategies and a belief that success is related to one’s effort. Similarly, goal-setting interventions that are aimed at getting students to establish realistic but challenging goals may be further enhanced when a mastery structure is in place.

Modifying or changing the nature of students’ experiences in the classroom may provide a viable way of redirecting students’ achievement goal orientation. Changing the classroom structure may not help some students who lack certain skills, who are not aware of critical learning strategies, and who, as a result of many accumulated experiences, have adopted a belief that they are not able. Although these students may need to learn new skills, modifying the goal structure of the classroom in such a way that mastery goals are salient and are adopted by students may also be necessary.

Mastery goals that are student selected provide students with agency in the process of their own learning and assessment towards mastery. Teachers could approach these assessments as bookends to a unit – presenting the students with the options before the unit begins and assessing mastery of the content based on the project based/skills based assessments included in the Think-Tac-Toe matrix. Teachers that want a common performance task that assesses the whole class can simply place that task in the center square.

The following link is an example of a Think-Tac-Toe choice board for the middle school study of slavery in the U.S.. In this case, the teachers chose a common task that assesses research, analytical and writing skills as a common (center square) assessment: Tic Tac Toe Slavery Assessment

For some very useful resources check out the Differentiation by Design wiki page.