Should students be taught on grade level?
When The Standards Company LLC provides reports on the state of the enacted curriculum, it is always careful to avoid stating unwarranted personal judgments. Instead, educational agencies should judge the results of educational research for themselves with respect to their own goals. In what follows, I will describe one reason why dogmatic targets often fail to take into consideration complex issues.
There is little doubt that the rise of content standards has changed the face of education, especially in regards to expectations. While in the past, teachers often claimed that they held high expectations for their students, state and national standards have recently delineated what the term “high expectations” constitutes.
To some teachers, high expectations now means teaching at what the state defines as “grade level.” To other teachers, however, state content standards merely set the norm; high expectations correlate to above-grade-level content.
When I first began training teachers in professional development workshops, a few teachers would state that they didn’t need to teach on grade level because they felt the standards were too high for their students. Some teachers would even say that they focused instead on basic skills (a euphemism for “far below grade level”) because their students (get this) “did not go to college.”
My response was simple: If my students don’t go to college, I want that to be their decision. If I teach students content that is below grade level, I am making the decision for them. I find that unacceptable.
Today, more teachers recognize the importance of teaching students grade-level content. But should we teach students “above grade level”? The answer is similar to the answer to many education questions: “It depends.”
We should first recognize that state content standards define learning objectives, not teaching objectives. The distinction between the two terms will not surface until we explore the relationship between state content standards and depth of knowledge.
In many states, the English language arts standards increase in rigor according to the procedural knowledge needed to perform the standard. For example, in one grade level (let’s say, Grade 7) students may only be asked to identify metaphors in poetry; the state assessment would likely provide a list of phrases from a poem and ask students to choose the one that corresponds to a metaphor. In Grade 8, students could be asked to explain the meaning of metaphors; in this case, students could identify the metaphor and ask students which explanation best describes its meaning. Both standards relate to the same concept: metaphors. The difference between the two grade levels centers primarily on their levels of depth of knowledge, a model of rigor first described by Norman Webb.[1] The Grade 7 example (identify) corresponds to Level 1; the Grade 8 example (explain) corresponds to Level 2. (The Bloom’s Taxonomy levels [2] would differ as well.)
Should we teach students skills associated with Grade 8 in Grade 7? I certainly think so, because a necessary means of cementing understanding at a particular level of rigor (whether it be described by Bloom’s Taxonomy or depth of knowledge) is to expose students to content at higher levels of rigor. In other words, when we teach students to analyze metaphors, even to a limited extent, we strengthen their ability to identify the appearance of metaphors.
Therefore, when a set of content standards increase from year to year through increased rigor, the appearance of a moderate amount of above-grade-level work should not be too alarming and could even be justified. (However, a predominance of above-grade-level work could indicate that the teaching staff is not sufficiently acquainted with the grade level standards targeted for their students.)
Now consider the case of mathematics, which in many states increases from year to year by changing to more advanced concepts, not necessarily through increased rigor. For example, students could be asked to calculate integers raised to powers in Grade 5, but asked to calculate square roots in Grade 6. If taught with an emphasis purely on procedural knowledge, the rigor would be the same in both standards: an apply-level Bloom’s Taxonomy and lowest level of depth of knowledge. Here, above-grade-level work is not more rigorous, but rather off topic — a more serious situation. The same condition typically applies to science and history/social studies, where above-grade-level work often means students are taught concepts not even related to the adopted curriculum.
So, should students be taught above grade level work? Teachers should base this decision on a firm understanding of rigor and the structure of their own state’s content standards.
[1] Webb, N. L., Alignment study in language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies of state standards and assessments for four states, Council of Chief State School Officers, Washington D.C., 2002. See http://facstaff.wcer.wisc.edu/normw/TILSA/TILSA.pdf.
[2] Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrich, P. R., Raths, J., Wittrock, M. C., A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 2001.