Develop a Christ-Centered Worldview
Michael Essenburg, MA, is a coach, consultant, and trainer with Close the Gap Now, a service of Christian Academy in Japan. When time permits, he serves in those capacities for ACSI international and MK schools and members of the Japan Evangelical Missionary Association. To learn more, please visit closethegapnow.org.
Like you, I want students to develop a Christ-centered worldview. Like you, I want students to understand the importance of connecting what they study with biblical principles, and I want students to make these connections proficiently.
How can you help your students understand the significance of correlating their studies with what God says in His Word?
Use the same strategy you use for helping your students know what other course content is important—give an assessment. That’s right. Give a biblical-perspective assessment. Assessing students’ progress in this area is reasonable. After all, you’ve taught them a biblical perspective of what they’re studying, and you check their progress with other material you deem important.
By evaluating biblical perspective, you demonstrate that you think such a worldview is important, and you help students think it’s important. Trust me—students correlate what’s assessed with what’s important. (If you don’t assess biblical perspective, your students will probably conclude that it’s less significant, like other topics that come up in class that you don’t test on. Not good.)
How can you help your students proficiently connect academic knowledge and Bible truth?
Use the same strategy you use for helping your students become proficient in any skill you teach— give them practice. You know practice helps. Writing essays helps your students hone their writing. Performing in concerts helps your students improve their singing. Giving speeches helps them develop their speaking skills. Essays, concerts, and speeches are forms of assessment. Assessment helps your students improve.
Assessment will also help your students relate scriptural principles to their studies. That’s right. Your students will improve their connections as they complete assessments.
What types of assessment can you give your students?
Any type—provided you use assessment prompts that SCORE. You can give more than just tests. For example, you can ask your students to write essays, do projects, and give presentations.
What do I mean by “provided you use assessment prompts that SCORE”? I mean that assessment prompts should have the following characteristics:
- Be Student-friendly
- Require students to Connect what they study to biblical principle(s) and life experience
- Give Opportunities for student choice, as appropriate
- Be Rigorous
- Be Even worthy of being taught to
Let me further explain these five characteristics of an effective biblical-perspective assessment.
1. Your assessment prompt should be Student-friendly. Use developmentally appropriate vocabulary. For example, you can use “disregard” with 10th graders, but not with 6th graders. Be sure to keep your assessment prompt to 75 words or less. That’s right, 75 words for high school students and fewer for lower grades.
The assessment doesn’t need to be teacher-friendly, because the teacher isn’t taking the assessment. I’ve seen prompts that only the teacher could really understand—500 words with no clear point. Remember, the goal is not to have an assessment prompt that makes sense to you, the teacher. The goal is to have an assessment prompt that makes sense to your students.
The following two assessment prompts use developmentally appropriate vocabulary and 75 words or less:
Science 8: Presentation—Give a five-minute presentation on a piece of electricity-related technology. Present the electrical device, the science of how it works, and a response to the following questions: How has this device influenced society? What’s a biblical perspective of that impact?
English 10: Essay (750 words)—Compare and contrast how two characters from Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country illuminate the biblical concept of shalom, and apply the concept to a current event or a personal situation.
2. Your assessment prompt should require your students to Connect what they study to biblical principle(s) and life experience. Through Christian education, you want your students to relate decisions made by government to Bible concepts about justice and peace. You want your students to connect ecology with biblical stewardship principles as well as how they dispose of trash. You want your students to associate literary themes with what God says about love and also with the movies they watch.
How can you help your students make such connections? By giving assessments that require your students to connect academic content and skills, biblical values, and “real” life. In other words, don’t give an assessment that leaves things disconnected. That’s like putting chocolate-chip cookie ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla, and chocolate chips) in a bowl, but not stirring them together to make dough. Which would you rather eat: chocolate-chip cookie dough or unmixed ingredients?
What does an assessment prompt that requires students to make connections look like?
Math 6: Construct a model of the solar system that accurately represents planet size and planet distance from the sun. Next, write a paragraph in response to the following question: What does math have to do with God’s world? In your paragraph, make three connections between the biblical truths we studied in class and the model you made. Include quotations from two Bible passages.
English 12: Essay (1,000 words): Use a biblical perspective to explain the nature of evil, its relationship to suffering, and what you can do to respond in a Christian way to both. Support your thinking using literature examples, the Bible, and life experience.
3. Your assessment prompt should give Opportunities for student choice, as appropriate. Giving your students the opportunity to make choices engages them and unleashes student learning and potential. I’ve seen this repeatedly. So have you. Give your students opportunities to choose, for example, the type of project, the topic of a presentation, the examples for an essay, or the color of paper for a poster.
The following two assessment prompts give students opportunities to make choices:
Science 2: Writing—Write a two-paragraph report about a dinosaur of your choice. Include where the dinosaur lived, when it lived, what it ate, what it looked like, its size, how it got its name, who discovered it, and any other interesting facts you found. Give three examples of how your dinosaur shows God’s creativity and power.
Social Studies 6: Presentation (5 minutes)—Teach your classmates about an aspect of ancient Egyptian culture or history that you researched. Show what the Bible teaches about your research topic and how these principles connect to you.
4. Your assessment prompt should be Rigorous. A rigorous assessment inspires student learning. In my experience, students enjoy challenging assessments and don’t enjoy easy assessments.
For example, don’t give this easy presentation assessment: Share something you found interesting (2–3 minutes).
Instead, give the following rigorous assessment: Connect to something you studied this semester, develop that connection as your project, connect a biblical principle to the topic, and relate the biblical principle to your life in a way you can implement and report on. This may be done as an individual (5-to-8-minute presentation) or in a group (8-to-10-minute presentation).
Don’t give the following easy writing assessment: Describe the theme of one of the short stories you read (one paragraph).
Instead, give a rigorous writing assessment: In a 500-word essay, identify a theme in one of the short stories you read, analyze how the author uses literary conventions to communicate it, and evaluate the theme from a biblical perspective.
5. Your assessment prompt should be Even worthy of being taught to. You might be wondering, “Is it really OK to teach to an assessment?” Yes. In fact, teaching to an assessment is an effective practice. When I teach, I look at what my students are supposed to learn, develop an assessment to support that goal, and teach to it. Be sure to prepare your students by teaching to the assessment—just make sure your assessment is actually worthy of being taught to!
What does a worthy assessment look like? Here is a prompt for a 750-word essay for English 10: Using the poetry analysis skills we practiced, critique the lyrics of a favorite song (what the lyrics say, how they say it, and what God might think of what they say).
So, what does a biblical-perspective assessment that SCOREs look like?
Here’s a prompt for a 750-word essay: How is the tendency to disregard the human dignity of others a significant factor in world problems, and how should a Christian respond? Support your answer with (1) examples from literature, history or current events, and your own experience, and (2) the biblical principles of respecting God’s image bearers and loving our neighbors.
Biblical-perspective assessments that SCORE show your students the importance of relating their studies to God’s Word and help them make those connections more proficiently. In addition, such assessments will help teachers like you teach even more effectively by giving you assessment data you can use to modify instruction to increase student learning.
Just imagine: You’re teaching Social Studies 7. You’ve just finished grading some projects in which you required your students to connect what they studied with biblical principles. The grades are entered in your grade book, and the feedback sheets are ready to be passed back tomorrow. And now you’re thinking about your next unit.
Stop. Before you prepare the next unit, take time to reflect on your assessment results. Think about what your students learned, how you feel about their progress, and how you will modify instruction to increase student learning. This task doesn’t need to take more than 30 minutes—and neglecting it makes about as much sense as a basketball coach not reviewing game stats to determine what to do in practice.
So, take time to reflect on your assessment results, by yourself or with a partner. I recommend you evaluate the assessment using a set of questions such as the following:
- What was the assessment?
- How well did your students demonstrate their understanding and application of a biblical perspective?
- How did you prepare your students to demonstrate a scriptural worldview on your assessment?
- What satisfies or concerns you about how you prepared your students?
- What excites or challenges you about the assessment results?
- To maintain and/or increase student learning about Bible values, what two or three things do you want to keep doing/start doing?
- Other insights?
- How will you modify instruction to increase student learning?
The following are some sample modifications:
In their projects, your Social Studies 7 students didn’t demonstrate depth of understanding about the scriptural principles they cited. You think about your next unit. You had planned to have your students do a homework assignment in which they would identify their own principles. Instead, you decide to select five key Bible principles and have your students study them for two class periods.
In their presentations, your Science 8 students used object lessons (for example, that Jesus is the light of the world) instead of relating what they studied (for example, light) to Bible concepts regarding God’s creative power. You decide to do a lesson on the difference between creating object lessons and connecting what they study with what the Bible teaches.
In their essays, your English 10 students didn’t effectively weave a Christian worldview into their essays. You decide to teach a lesson to help students (1) include scriptural ideas in the topic sentence and (2) state the topic sentence first and then support it with Bible verses.
Bottom line: Help your students further develop a Christ-centered worldview. Use assessment to help your students understand the importance of relating their academic work to scriptural principles and help them become proficient in making those connections. Develop biblical perspective assessments that SCORE. Then, teach to your assessments, have your students take them, and use your assessment data to modify instruction.
Reference
Paton, Alan. 2003. Cry, the Beloved Country. New York: Scribner.
CSE 13.3 Assessment