After the students had completed all the stations, the classroom teacher and I were somewhat disappointed with the behaviour and apparent lack of engagement on the students and questioned the quality and depth of learnig achieved. Rather than beating ourselves up about what we thought and felt, I determined the only way we could know for sure was to use an exit slip. We simply had students write on a post-it note two things they learned about light and two things they learned about sound from the stations.
When we reviewed the exit slips we were blown away. What we found was that there were a few students who struggled to obtain the understanding we had hoped; however, these students were in fact our vulnerable learners who struggle with concepts anyway. A large number of students met our expectations of student learning. These of course are the students who would of likely learned the same material no matter which instructional method we chose. Finally, we had four students who completely shocked us in their learning from the stations. Unexpectedly, these were some of the same students who we felt were 'fooling around' quite a bit. More importantly these were also the students who often fade in and out with attention during direct instruction and naturally struggle to sit in their desks for long periods.
What we were able to conclude from the exit slip was a level of understanding from four students that the teacher often finds difficult to assess. While our gut reaction was telling us that the stations were unsuccessful, the fact that we were able to engage four more students than normal was solid reinforcement that hands-on inquiry based learning is what's best. More importantly, we can now use the information from the exit slips to address any misunderstandings before moving on with our unit.
The exit slip, a simple but powerful formative assessment tool.