I consider my theoretical beliefs about learning to be influenced by bits and pieces of many different theories, but my main theoretical beliefs wrapped around Gardeners’ theory, behaviorism, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of development, and cognitive learning theory.

I am a firm believer of Gardener’s theory of Multiple Intelligence; this theory is at the top of my list because I think that every student is a specific type of learner, whether that is visual, audio, or kinesthetic.  I realize that every student most likely has a combination of two types of learning, or even all three, but I believe that every student has more of one type of learner than an equal amount of all three.  I believe that as a teacher recognizing these different learners can help me with my lesson and assessment planning to help students understand to the best of their abilities.

I believe one way students learn best is through hands-on activities and experience.  I consider relating curriculum being taught with real world connections helps students gain a better understanding and grasp to make connections that help them further comprehend and attain knowledge that will benefit them along through their lives.

With these beliefs about learning, I feel that my thoughts on assessment go hand in hand with each other.    Assessing is a great way to see students progress and understanding, it is also a way of seeing whether the students understood the lesson being assessed or not and what may need some more improvement. 

Although I believe that assessing is a reliable strategy for teachers to turn to when checking for student progress and comprehension, I do have some biases.  With each student there comes a different learning style, with each learning style comes a different approach to understanding and different ways of expressing and completing curriculum.  I believe that assessments can hurt students if the assessment was not fitting for that students learning style, and if that happens, that student could have biases (large and/or small) that carry on with them throughout their academic career.

Along that note and since I am aware of this situation, I will be as knowledgeable and considerate with my assessments, holding high expectations for every one of my students, yet knowing that each student is different, they have good and bad days, and to really do my best to get the most accurate data to help improve my curriculum for each student.  No matter what level each student is at, my goal is by the end of the year to have each of those students one grade higher than before.  In my classroom we will move forward, never back.

My daily formative assessments varied from day to day, but for the most part my main goal was to analyze my students’ performance based on whether or not they had verbally said, colored, or glue the correct answers on their worksheets or by responding during my lesson. 

It may seem that finding the results to my formative assessments were difficult every day, but in all truth, I actually found it quite easy to analyze whether the students understood or not.  During lessons where I would use verbal responses as my formative assessment, I made sure that I asked my questions in a number of ways so that all of my students could understand what I was asking.  Also, I would have them physically show me the answer as well, for further verification, i.e. when I asked students to show me what part of your body you use to smell, they would point to their nose, then I would ask, what part of the body do you use to smell things, they would verbally say nose. 

I had to be careful what order I went in when asking these questions aloud, if I would ask for the verbal response before the physical, I would not know whether to measure these answers or not because students may have heard that the answer was nose, and so now they will just point to their nose because of that reason. 

I always tried to match my student performance in relation to my objectives, to me this seemed like it would be an easy task, but after some lessons I did notice myself going off on asking different questions than what my objectives were.  I still asked questions that I wanted to make sure my students were retaining the correct information, but some days they were just a touch off from my daily objectives. 

The most common way I did formative assessments was through my daily worksheets.  While teaching, I enjoyed giving out worksheets because I felt that it was true, hard evidence whether or not my students successfully understood the daily objective or not.  I still believe this somewhat, but after I got done teaching my unit, I went through the students work to look at my data and remember back to each lesson and recollected that some days we ran short on time, or I underestimated the time it would take for students to complete assignments, so most students did not get to finish their assignments.  This was disturbing to me, because I would have love to have seen my students end results on all of their assignments.  Although this was an eye opener for me, and I know realize to include this into my lesson planning, I just did not realize it during my time at my school. 

 Students did met my objectives as a class and individually.  I made a plus minus checklist for my formative assessments so that I could go through and see each student’s performance in each lesson, and then easily see the class as a whole.  I was very pleased to see a larger amount of pluses than minuses. 

Being in a Kindergarten class, I did not feel that using grade letters were appropriate, I was looking for if each individual student understood the material and if I saw multiple minuses for one or more lessons, I would rethink my lessons.  I was pleased to see that for lesson one, two, four, and five, all of my students got pluses, this meaning that they got every part of my formative assessment correct and that those formative assessments followed my daily and unit objectives as well.  But, on lessons three, six, and seven a few students got minuses. 

The reason why I think two of my students got two minuses out of seven assessments is because they are both these students are ELL students and they both have a difficult time understanding me when I talk to them, I noticed that visuals make all the difference, so perhaps on those two days I did not explain my expectations clear enough or went too fast possibly. 

Also I have three others, which got one minus during the seven lessons; these that are very young Kindergarteners.  These five I can see reasons why they may have just barely missed the plus, they try hard, but sometimes they show me that they are not quite at the same ‘maturity’ level as all the other, older Kindergarteners, they seem like they do not yet know all of the procedures and expectations in the classroom.   I wish I would have thought more about this when I was in the classroom to help cater to these three. 

There is one more student that got one minus during the seven lessons, I did not mention him in the ELL part or the young Kindergartener part because he is neither, he is a very high student, so this somewhat surprised me when I saw that he did not get full credit.  Although this did startle me a bit, on the other hand it did not either, he is a very verbal, very silly boy, and I can recall this lesson where he got the minus and how silly he was acting during my lesson and on throughout the day.  Again, I wish I would have spent a little more time planning my lessons and thought about him a bit more and what I could have done differently. 

Something that I was not expecting to see from my students was that during the unit all of the words that some students learned through our vocabulary.  One day during snack time three boys had their journals out and were copying words off of the sight chart and talking about the book we read that day, “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”  This really surprised me that they were so in to copying these words down, but on the other hand this group of students really enjoyed the story that day and were very involved during that part of the lesson. 

As far as pre- and post-assessment went, I was very pleased not only with my results, but also with how great the procedure of the assessments went and how well behaved and focused the students were.  For the pre- and post-assessments, I did use number grading, I gave my students five possible points, one point for ever sense. 

The pre-assessment results showed that three out of 12 students missed one, so those students got four out of five for a grade.  The remaining eight students received five out of five for the assessment.  I went through each test and the three that got one wrong all got a different sense wrong; one missed the eyes, one missed the mouth, and one missed the ears.  Two of the three students that missed one answer are my young students and the third student is my very high, yet silly student.  I recall him taking the test and started talking during the test while I was speaking, so he possible could have not heard what I was saying, or he could have misunderstood the question.

One the day of the post-assessment all but one of my students was at school, so I had 11 out of 12 students there for my lesson.  I was very pleased to see that 11 of my students got five out of five on the post-assessment.  I was disappointed that this one student was absent that day because I was curious to see his results.  He is one of my very young students, but on the pre-assessment he got five out of five and during the formative assessments he got five out of seven pluses (he was absent one day and got a minus one day). 

I used the same pre- and post-assessment tools, for this age, I felt that these materials were most appropriate and most accurate for what I was looking for.  However, after looking at my data, I did question myself thinking that I maybe should not have done the same test both times, because all the students could have memorized the answers rather than truly learned the material.  One thing I thought I could do next time if I ever did this unit again, is to at least switch up the colors and where those colors go to circle the parts, because then I would have a strong reason for not thinking that the students memorized the answers.     

My objectives fit well with my pre- and post-assessment, they all came together to really compliment each, yet still hit all of the areas.  I was happy with how my assessments and objectives worked out.

After my unit was over and I was still at my practicum sight, I overheard two of my students talking and one mentioned something about the five senses so I was pleased to hear that, also three other times students mentioned to me a comment about the five senses where they recognized that they use their eyes to see and they were using their sense of touch to feel.  That was the most rewarding part of the practicum.