The aptness of fit between task design and students’ written work: Illustrations of harmony and dissonance in science and history classrooms

Educational practice requires teachers to manage the intellectual space surrounding learning in their classrooms. Prototypically, teachers’ decision making involves identifying learning objectives and then organising activities that lead students towards the production of artefacts that demonstrate their understanding of key concepts and information in designated fields of study. However, in practice, there are occasions where teachers’ designs and students’ output are misaligned and this phenomenon usually has a negative impact on students’ levels of achievement. Explaining how and why students’ work fails to meet expectations is a sensitive matter that may not be adequately explained by simplistic deficit models concerning the child.

Drawing on data collected as part of CRPP’s Digital Curricular Literacies project, this paper reports preliminary relationships between learning task characteristics (outcomes, strategies, scaffolding), teachers’ process goals (e.g., remember, understand, evaluate) in lower-secondary science and history classrooms and the quality of students’ work. Our subsequent discussion focuses on cases where student underachievement seems to be attributable to imprecision in learning task design and/or inadequate classroom practice. Potential consequences on students’ ability to communicate will be highlighted and suggestions made about scaffolding students’ learning successfully in the completion of ill-structured learning tasks.