Gap Thinking

One way to help improve teaching and learning is to focus on Gap Thinking.  When students are not providing work at the expectation level of the course, it is considered a deficiency.  Different from the deficiency itself, Gap Thinking is the flawed thinking that leads to the wrong answer.  With just about anything people learn, improvement comes from correcting faulty logic, assumptions, and habits, not from merely pointing out what is deficient.

We can help our students with more precise feedback and instruction when we uncover what they actually think about a topic, and work with them to correct problems or access the appropriate practice needed to reach mastery.  You can gather information about Gap Thinking while you are assessing a students by getting them to reflect during the assessment.  It can be as simple as questions that require description of their process, pointed questions about a specific step, or even ratings of how certain they felt about their answer.

For example, if a student is repeatedly getting a math problem wrong, among the causes could be not knowing how to multiply negatives (previous content), that the student doesn’t understand the steps or process (current content), or may be unable to deal word problems (application).  Regardless, structuring the assessment to provide clues into which of these may be the issue is an effective way to help the student grow.  A good personal trainer wouldn’t merely inform somebody they’re overweight or that they eat too much.  They might help a person realize, for example, that it’s not as simple as how many carbohydrates you eat, but also what type and when.  By the same token, simply telling students they answered 20/30 correctly or wrote a C-level essay does not help them improve.

This really isn’t anything new, is it?  For years, math teachers have asked for students to show their work and marked the type of error.  The additional value of focusing on gap thinking is getting the students to focus on it as well.  If the assessments and criteria are structured with this end in mind, we can increase the students’ ability to diagnose and correct their own gap thinking, or at least have a greater sense of ownership and control.  It’s not hard to see how it can be easier and more effective to help a student when they approach you with a better sense of their own deficiencies. Granted, they will need help with this, but the mentality of “why am I wrong and how do I fix it?” is much more conducive to education than “what did I get wrong, and did I do good or bad?”  If we don’t ask for more, they often stop at judgement, rather than reflect and grow.

(If you're interested in more along these lines, I highly recommend you check out Proficiency Based Assessment, written by a number of school leaders from Steven High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois.  It can be found on Amazon here.  I don't get a kickback or anything...it's just thought provoking book and I recommend it.)