How to teach capitalization

It seems like a good idea: A two-minute video about capitalization followed by multiple-choice questions.

For instance: “I live in kansas.” vs. “I live in Kansas.”

But if the student gets 100% of the questions correct, will they be able to capitalize words correctly in their own work?

We don’t know, because the tool we’re using is assessing a different skill. The multiple choice questions are actually testing whether the student can identify the correctly capitalized sentence when it’s placed alongside three incorrect ones.

I call this a School-Only Skill (SOS). It has little application beyond these kinds of assignments.

Instead, let’s teach students to capitalize by giving them practice actually doing it.

You might say, “Write five sentences, each using the name of one of the fifty states.”

If all five sentences are capitalized correctly, the student has demonstrated that they grasp this aspect of capitalization. If the sentences aren’t capitalized correctly (“North carolina”), the student can try again with five more sentences. Then, you can move on to a different capitalization challenge (“Write five sentences, each using the name of an ancient civilization”).

This is appropriately challenging, effective, and actually very efficient. The student is practicing a number of critical non-SOS’s in one simple assignment.

This approach doesn’t scale. The students’ responses can’t be scored by a computer on a standardized test. And an online learning system would need pretty sophisticated AI to make it work.

But let’s favor the children over the bureaucrats. Let’s prioritize real learning over the illusion of learning.