Lisa Gibson

Commercial worksheets are a staple in many classrooms around the nation.  I know that many times in my experience as a teacher I would inevitably look to commercial material to at least give me a starting point for an assignment.  I was using commercially created assignments but I realize now that I should have reflected more thoroughly on how I was using them.  I should have addressed two questions, “Am I  utilizing commercial materials effectively?” and “Are students being challenged by these assignments?”  During the course of my employment with the Standards Co. I have reviewed thousands of student samples and I found some interesting trends that addressed my concerns.

The first trend I noticed is that a majority of the samples I came across were commercially created.   This was particularly true for grades K-6. The preponderance of commercial materials is not a good or bad thing (although there are certainly poorly executed and well executed examples of commercial worksheets) but merely a fact owing to their availability and practicality.  A second trend I found is that many of the most cognitively rigorous portions of these worksheets are never assigned to students.  All too often students would complete the sections that dealt with repetition, basic application and recall; then when it came to the more complex extension activities at the end of the assignment they would be crossed out.  This had a marked effect on the level of cognitive rigor of the assignment.   Using Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge model of cognitive rigor as our alignment tool, many assignments which started with a 2 or 3 on the DOK scale would lower to a one (the lowest level of cognitive rigor) when the extension activity was crossed out. (Webb. 1997. “Criteria for Alignment NISE Brief, Madison: Wisconsin Center for Education Research, National Institute for Science Education. p 15-17.)

Are these trends surprising?   From my own experience as an educator the answer would be no.  The pressures of large class sizes, time constraints and the stresses of end of the year testing are all factors which would lead teachers to omit these extension activities.   I know that I am certainly guilty of having my students pass up some of the more challenging assignments given on student worksheets.   However, a handful of assignments I saw utilized the extension activities and it got me to thinking how teachers could implement these activities keeping the above constraints in mind.

One sample worksheet had students identifying irregular verbs in 20 sentences.  They were then asked in the extension activity to use certain verbs in a descriptive paragraph.  The latter activity is higher in terms of cognitive rigor and I think that most educators would agree that exposing students to higher levels of thinking is a crucial component of effective curriculum.  One possible suggestion is that instead of having the students complete the entire worksheet, if the students demonstrate mastery over the first ten questions they could then move on to the extension activity.  Another alternative is if the assignment isn’t the first time students were exposed to identification of specific verbs, they could start with the extension activity and work in reverse order on the worksheet.   In this instance the students could start with the challenging activity first and then reinforce their knowledge by completing the other questions, time permitting.

I am certain that many teachers would come up with similar (or better) solutions to this problem.  It’s not that teachers don’t think that teaching more rigorous materials is important.  It is more about those teachers being bogged down with other concerns and not using creative measures to use these extension activities that are provided.  I think if teachers were reminded of how important these types of activities were they would be less apt to omit them from their lessons.  Ultimately, it is a positive that commercially created worksheets offer extension activities and I know that in the future I will do my best to utilize them fully in the classroom.