Benefits for Teachers

The ASSET team has been periodically requested to conduct sessions for teachers to help them design questions that can distinguish between students who have understood key concepts vis-a-vis students who have only memorized the same. Over the past 7 years the ASSET team has built a strong expertise in designing questions and these questions have received over a million student responses. Based on an analysis of this data the ASSET team has built a compilation of good practices that lead to effective questions. The ASSET team is aiming at sharing these practices and tips with teachers of schools that take ASSET so that a larger pool of teachers can learn from and contribute to this compilation. The tips will be made available to teachers of all schools participating in ASSET in 2008 via email (PDF format) on a monthly basis.

The benefits to teachers from the Question Making tips would be

These ideas are borne out of the experience of the ASSET Test Development Team and will definitely add value to practicing teachers by offering them a scientific approach towards measuring student learning.

The ASSET team is proposing to make available to the teaching community a service called the Teacher Help-Line. Through this service, the teachers would be able to email their queries to a group of senior educationists and researchers from the ASSET team and get responses from them within a stipulated period. This service would encourage teachers to ask for help and therefore spur continuous teacher improvement. The help-line would document specific questions and their responses so that an FAQ compilation could be maintained for the benefit of other teachers who would have similar questions.

The benefits to teachers from the Teacher Help-line Services would be:

This service is being offered to all participating schools in ASSET in 2008. Kindly email your queries to ts@ei-india.com. Do not forget to mention that name of your school in your email.

Why “TEACHER SHEETS”?

Research clearly suggests that the role of teachers and the teaching-learning process is central in ensuring that students learn with understanding. This in turn is strongly influenced by teachers’ understanding how children learn and the misconceptions in their minds.

Teachers need to be aware that students have prior beliefs and incomplete understandings that can conflict with what is being taught at school. Teachers need to build on the existing ideas of students and slowly lead them to more mature understandings. Ignoring prior beliefs can lead to the formation of misconceptions. Analysis of ASSET data and Student Misconception Interviews have given us at EI amazing and very interesting insights about how students are thinking and learning. The teacher sheets are our way of sharing these learnings with schools and teachers.

Guiding Principals for the “TEACHER SHEETS”