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Kathleen Dudden Rowlands recommends using checklists to support student learning and performance. Well-designed checklists identify steps students can take to complete complex tasks, which scaffolds students' metacognitive development and fosters the confidence and independence needed for internalizing these steps for future tasks.
Everybody uses checklisrs. A Google search for checklist resulted in 9-9 million hits, offering checklists for wedding planning, baby proofing homes, flying planes, and remodeling bathrooms - not to mention a plethora of even more exotic applications. Many of us would never think of taking a long trip or going backpacking without using a checklist. And, according to a well-known December tune, even Santa uses a checklist to remember which houses to visit on Christmas Eve. With checklists a habitual parr of my everyday life, I am chagrined to realize how slow I was to incorporate them into my collection of pedagogical tools.
There are sound reasons to employ checklists in classroom instruction. A number of authors have addressed their functionality. Kathleen Strickland and James Strickland, for example, value rhe flexibility of classroom checklists, suggesting that teachers can develop checklists to use with individual students or with the entire class (28-32). They point out that teachers can use rhem efficiently to record abilities students should display when confronted with particular tasks (28). Targeting checklists developed for teacher use, the Stricklands note that they can be formative - "used to record data during assessment" - or summative - "used to make evaluations, based on collected data" (29)- That is to say, checklists are tools to capture and catalogue information about student performance and to inform instruction or provide evidence on which to base evaluation. Employed in these ways, checklists provide broad assessment tools for teachers.
Additionally, teachers can develop checklists for students to use themselves. The Stricklands suggest providing students with checklists to "catalog{ue] the items that should be included in a project or task" (28). Anne Ruggles Gere, Leila Christenbury, and Kelly Sassi recommend using checklists "to keep students on task" during peerresponse sessions (57). In both cases, checklists serve as memory aids when students work through unfamiliar processes or complete complex tasks. As intuitively acceptable as such suggestions are, however, no theoretical work examining the value of checklists for teachers and...