HEAP's Cognitive Complexity Progressionsfor Professional Development
Transforming health education instruction to improve health literacy in the 21st century requires students to use higher order thinking skills to apply their health knowledge in relevant ways.
Using the HEAP skill cues developed for the National Health Education Standards, the HEAP developed a progression of cognitively complex assessments to support teachers’ professional development in improving their instructional practices. The cognitive complexity progressions are being developed for middle and high school grade levels and based on the 6 levels in Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating).
As a professional development experience teachers are asked to analyze each level of the assessment progressions and determine the instructional activities they must provide students to support a deeper level of thinking and learning. As trained teachers begin to understand and use these progressions, we hope they will use the HEAP’s web-based system to create their own cognitively complex assessments and contribute to the expansion of the HEAP’s assessment bank.
Example of a Cognitive Complexity Progression:
Health Skill Being Assessed: Accessing Information
Grade Level: High School
Scenario: Michael and Maria are talking about HIV and she is concerned that Michael has many misconceptions about the transmission of the disease. She wants to provide Michael with accurate information. She identifies the local health department, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the internet as three sources she could use. She has also identified the following criteria to determine if these resources are valid and reliable sources of information:
- Currency – the timeliness of the information
- Relevance – the importance of the information for your needs
- Authority – the source of the information
- Accuracy – the reliability, truthfulness, and correctness of the information content
- Purpose – the reason the information exists.
The following assessment progressions build upon the above scenario:
(Note: The first level of Bloom's revised taxonomy, "remembering", is incorporated into the scenario above to ensure students have the basic content needed to answer questions requiring higher cognitive demand.)
- Understanding: In your own words, explain the meaning of each criterion Maria chose to determine the validity of the sources.
- Applying: Illustrate how Maria would use validity criteria to determine if the three resources she chose are valid.
- Analyzing: Use validity criteria to compare and contrast three sources of information on HIV information.
- Evaluating: Evaluate each source in terms of their validity justifying your judgment.
- Creating: Develop a poster to be placed in your school that informs the student body about the facts about HIV/AIDS. In your poster identify valid sources of information and the types of services that students can access to prevent HIV. Write a report on the process you used to determine the validity of your sources.
Example of Classroom Use:
"I can already see myself using these prompts as journal entries, building on the complexity day-to-day, and then having my students identify the differences in the levels of the prompts."
"The cognitive complexity component is a very rich resource that repeatedly illustrates the depth of teaching and learning. This can be a strong component to our Standards and Assessment II training in South Dakota. The participants are shown illustrations of assessment results using selected response items and constructed response items. The degree of richness in the students' evidence of knowledge and skills gained becomes increasingly clear as the test author becomes more assessment-savvy with regard to cognitive complexity.
–Rhonda Kemmis, Health Teacher, South Dakota
Please contact Nancy Hudson, HEAP Coordinator, CCSSO, for more
information!
|
