Title: The Importance of Checking for Understanding
Headings: The Importance of Checking for Understanding
The Importance of Checking for Understanding
What is Checking for Understanding?
Research behind Checking for Understanding
Why is Checking for Understanding so beneficial?
Citations
Why do you use CFU? How can Checking for Understanding help you in your classroom? Please share any examples, comments, or feedback below.
Author: Patricia Bogdanovich

Content: Research behind Checking for Understanding
According to the article Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies that All Teachers Should Know by emeritus professor of education Barak Rosenshine ( American Educator, Spring 2012, effective instruction asks questions and checks responses of all students in order to help students practice new information and connect new material to their prior knowledge. The article suggests that to practice new information, teachers must ask students questions while they are teaching. In a classroom-based experiment, a group of teachers was asked to increase the number of factual questions and process questions during guided practice. The results of this experiment showed that students who had these teachers achieved higher scores than students whose teachers did not ask multiple questions. Also, teachers who asked a large number of questions had higher student participation. Furthermore, teachers were able to assess if the students understood the content, which allowed the teachers to make modifications of the lesson or reteach when necessary. Rosenshine observed that successful teachers found ways to involve all students in answering questions. Examples include having all students: Tell the answer to a neighbor
Summarize the main idea in one or two sentences, writing the summary on a piece of paper and sharing this with a neighbor
Writing an answer on a card and then holding it up
Raising their hands if they agree with the answer that someone else has given
The National Research Council recommends implementing formative (on-going) assessments such as checking for understanding in order to improve instruction.