Acing the Exam

How can librarians boost students' test scores? Bob Berkowitz shares a strategy for success

By Rick Margolis -- School Library Journal, 10/1/2002

Bob Berkowitz is tackling one of his favorite topics, high-stakes tests—those thorny competency-based exams that many students must pass before receiving their high school diplomas. As the accountability movement in American education continues to swell, an increasing number of states, including Connecticut, Texas, Michigan, and New York, have turned to formal assessments to gauge students' understanding of such disparate subjects as history, biology, language arts, physics, math, and foreign languages. In the anxiety-laden realm of big-time testing, Berkowitz is the equivalent of Mr. Goodwrench, seemingly able to fix whatever ails struggling students and perplexed instructors. In short, he's a school librarian who knows how to help kids become more sophisticated thinkers and, by extension, more savvy test takers.

The secret of Berkowitz's success is embodied in the Big6, a generic problem-solving strategy that he and his colleague Mike Eisenberg, now dean of the University of Washington's School of Information, invented in the late 1980s. The Big6 approach, as its name suggests, distills the decision-making process into six discrete, interrelated skills: task definition, information-seeking strategies, location and access, use of information, synthesis, and evaluation. (For more details, visit www.big6.org.)

The 54-year-old Berkowitz, a library media specialist at Wayne Central High School in Ontario Center, NY, is an unabashed Big6 booster—and for good reason. Five years ago, for example, he helped transform Scott Hopsicker, a fledgling social studies teacher at Wayne Central High, into an instructional dynamo. At the time, Hopsicker's students had performed poorly on New York's American History Regents Examination: for two consecutive years, scarcely more than 50 percent scraped by. Yet after working with Berkowitz, an impressive 91 percent of his class sailed successfully through the test. More recently, Berkowitz has had similar results in the sciences, helping teacher Mike Carges prime his Wayne Central students for the advanced placement test in physics. We spoke to Berkowitz about how librarians can play a leading role in helping students excel on tough formal tests.

Describe your approach to improving students' test scores.

The [most important] thing for me is this notion that instruction is a series of information problems—a very empowering idea for school librarians. What it says is that if you have an information problem-solving model as your curriculum, then you can use that model to design instruction and to teach skills so that students engage the content. Whenever you have a problem to solve or a decision to make, you can use this approach. It doesn't matter whether you're interested in finding out if whales swim on their backs, if chickens have elbows, what movie you want to go to on Friday night, or if it's the right time to refinance your mortgage.

Talk about working with teacher Scott Hopsicker.

Scott is a highly motivated young teacher. We analyzed the Regents Examination and the curriculum. We also looked at his prior teaching strategy, his approach to teaching. We had to develop a collaborative relationship, things that we believed in together. For example, we brainstormed on the characteristics that were indicative of high-quality instruction. We wanted to move students from being dependent learners to being independent learners. We wanted students to be able to incorporate higher-order thinking skills, because the examinations at the end [of the year] require analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. [The exams] also require being able to move from literal to interpretive to applied levels of thinking. We wanted to incorporate [those critical thinking skills] into our instructional models.

What we found was that in the prior year when we looked over the way he taught and his instructional materials and reviewed his lesson-plan book, we discovered that he was teaching a lot of content and [neglecting] the [problem-solving] processes needed to engage that content.

Is that characteristic of most teachers?

I think that most teachers approach instruction that way. So we taught kids how to think like social scientists. Right or wrong, we decided that we were going to teach social studies as a cause-and-effect relationship between social, political, and economic [factors] and foreign affairs.

Can you give an example of what an emphasis on process, rather than content, looks like in the classroom?

One of the early assignments was a fairly traditional assignment. It was to have students make a salt map of a country that had geographic features. We had students look at the impact of rivers on social, political, economic, and foreign affairs. The impact of mountains on social, political, economic, and foreign affairs. The impact of deserts on social [events]. In other words, what's the cause-and-effect relationship of geography to this discourse. Many of these [high-stakes] exams—the Regents exam and the state competency kinds of exams—are quite willing to give students information. But what they're asking students is to use those higher-order thinking skills—analysis, interpretation, the application of information—to solve a problem or answer a question.

In the elementary school, the cue words that lead you to this notion of problem solving [are] "who," "what," "when," "where," "why," [and] "how." Those are cue words to knowing that you have a problem to solve or a decision to make. In a secondary [education] situation, those morph or change into [words] like "compare" and "contrast" and "evaluate," "analyze," "discuss." Those are all, in effect, the first words to questions on the examinations.

I encouraged him to use these kinds of questions in his teaching to move students toward a higher order of thinking. He began asking questions: "What are the relationships between?" "How does this compare to?" "What is the effect on?" "How would this change if?" He moved his questioning techniques from the literal level to this interpretative and applied thinking level. That was real hard for him.

Talk more about the nuts and bolts of making your approach work with teachers.

[Scott and I] invested a lot of time and energy into designing instruction from the perspective that I've outlined. We met formally at least twice a week for two 50-minute planning periods. Additionally, I might have spent another hour working on some aspect of a project that we were collaborating on. He might have spent two or three or [as much as] six hours during the week working on projects, designing his instruction, and then bringing that information back the next time [we met]. We were continually working on instructional activities and units, continually talking about theory and approach. As we got toward the third quarter and fourth quarter [of the school year], he became more knowledgeable, more sophisticated: one of my goals was to make him an independent Big6er. Over time, the amount of time we spent together decreased. He became more competent.

What are some of the specific ways you collaborated with him?

I did a number of things. I observed his class as a mentor. I did a little bit of co-teaching with him. I did a lot of instructional design with him. In other words, he and I would jointly design instructional units and activities. It goes back to the notion that on one side [of the learning process] there's this content and on the other side, there's Big 6. Scott knows his content. The problem wasn't that he wasn't teaching the content. The problem was that he wasn't also [initially] teaching the [problem-solving] process. So kids didn't know when to engage the content. If they couldn't, for example, analyze what the question required them to do, which is task definition, they weren't able to engage the content he had taught them. They didn't have the right cue. Or, if they didn't practice self-evaluation, they never knew when they were finished. They didn't know what it took to earn an "A," because Scott hadn't considered the notion of evaluation as being important.

How can the average library media specialist begin replicating your success with Scott?

There are some key ideas in activating this collaborative process with teachers. I think school library media specialists need to take the initiative. They need to meet with administrators. The principal is the instructional leader in the school. The administrator needs to know what your approach is, what your curriculum is, what your goals are. Administrators are interested in student performance, student success, and student achievement.

So you addressed all of those concerns?

Absolutely. And early on when I got here, there was a situation with a faculty person who was teaching advanced placement social studies. His students were doing really poorly on a document-based question that appeared on those exams back in the early '80s. I was able to go in, collaboratively design instructional strategies with this teacher, and the scores improved immensely. All of a sudden, I built a lot of value. There was a lot of credibility to what I was saying. In a period of a few months, the scores changed drastically by doing the same basic things—going over and over and over again—what we were talking about relative to Scott Hopsicker. So taking the initiative, I think, is important.

I also think it's important to identify the teachers that you can work with. You know, sometimes those are the early adopters, sometimes they're your friends. Identifying those people who you can best and most easily work with, so you can build some chits, you build some credit. I start with three questions: What do I want to have happen? How can I make it happen? What am I going to accept as evidence that it's going on? I get really focused on those ideas. Trying to find answers to those three questions is really important to me.

Is there anything else you'd like librarians to know?

It's not that I believe in teaching to the test, because there are a lot of people that talk about teaching to the test. What I'm trying to suggest is that the test is a step on the way to something else. The something else, or goal, is that we want students to become lifelong learners. We want students to be able to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the events and information that impact their daily lives.

Librarians are in a unique position to help that happen. School library media specialists are the only ones with the unique set of training as information professionals in the schools. That's our bread and butter, that's our raison d'être as information specialists. No one else in the school has that area of expertise. They're all content experts. We have this professional obligation to act as consultants and collaborators in instructional design and development.