Children's Attention Spans are Short, and Education Deman...

The 2016 paper, “Off-task behavior in elementary school children,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Department of Education. The researchers also kept track of how the teachers were instructing students during these observations. Not surprisingly, students went off task more frequently during whole-group instruction than during small group or individual work. Length of lesson matters...

 UbD Three-Stage Template

To help educators start with the goal, rather than the learning activity, UbD employs a three-stage template. • Stage 1—Identify desired results: In the first stage, you consider your big ideas and learning goals and prioritize them. • Stage 2—Determine acceptable evidence: In the next stage, you “think like an assessor” (p. 18) to select the means for collecting and validating evidence students grasped your learning goals. • Stage 3—Plan learning experiences and instructio...