Ideally I wanted to use exit slips everyday to assess what students are able to tell me about what they learned from the lesson, what knowledge they can apply to some of the questions, and if there are any misunderstandings in their thinking regarding any aspect of the unit. The first day I used the sticky notes to assess student understanding of the lesson by asking the students what they learned, what was challenging, and if they had any questions. I did not receive many of the sticky notes back from the class because I was running out of time, and this was the first time the class did a closure activity with sticky notes. I learned that most students who responded to the questions with "nothing." There was one note that said the student needs help with "all of it" and that "all of it" was challenging.
The second time I used the sticky notes as exit slips I received more in comparison to the first time I tried it. I asked different questions that did not have them reflect on their learning, but I did ask them to write the area formulas for a rectangle, square, parallelogram, triangle, and trapezoid. According to the sticky notes that I received most students were able to write the area formulas for the rectangle, square, and parallelogram because they are the same. They struggled with writing from memory the area formula of a triangle and trapezoid. I noticed some students looking in their notes, which I was okay with because that showed me that the student was resourceful and knew where to look to find the area formula when needed.
The third time I used exit cards was very successful. I did not originally plan to have the index cards for the students' kite problems to be their exit cards, but I changed that as I realized I was running out of class time and it was close to the end of class. I was able to receive all the cards from all the students in the class. I was surprised, but I learned that they participated and was able to follow the lesson to show me what they learned on their index card.
One day I randomly asked the students to give me a thumbs up or thumbs down if they understood a question, and I received one student feedback with a thumbs up. I did not follow through with this formative assessment because I did not plan to ask it and thought it was not the right question to ask in the moment and changed my mind. Later on when I reflected back on this assessment that it was a valid question and I should have held the students accountable for answering.
The use of warm-ups in my unit were to support student learning and to assess student understanding. Throughout my teaching experience I would observe students work during the lesson to assess student understanding. Warm-ups informed which students knew the material to start answering the warm-up and which students needed more guidance and help to answer the warm-ups. Even though we would cover the warm-up as a whole class, I was able to observe some students who participated, who did not participate, and who would try to copy down the answers as we went over it.
Throughout some of lessons I would walk around and assess student understanding by asking students questions about their work, and about what to do to start solving some of the practice problems.
The course is based of proficiency grading by following Oregon state standards in high school mathematics. The proficiency quizzes were assessments that informed me about what student struggled with in the unit as well as what they learned before this unit. There were proficiency quizzes that I needed to administer during my unit because the students were given several opportunities to take a proficiency quiz after the first one they take. I administered the Angle Relationships Quiz #3, Quadrilateral Properties Quiz #2, Quadrilateral Properties Quiz #3, Area Quiz #1, and Area Quiz #2. Students struggled in the Quadrilateral Properties quizzes, which could have affected the students understanding and performance on the area quizzes. Some of the questions in the area quizzes required the students to be able to activate prior knowledge of the quadrilateral properties in order to calculate the missing dimension and/ or area. The students are constantly being quizzed, and in their feedback forms some mentioned that they receive too many quizzes. It is understandable that the students are frustrated from the amount of quizzes given, but the quizzes are formative assessments that inform the teacher what the students are struggling with and what the students know.
At the end of each week there was a homework quiz, which took questions from the homework assignments in to create a quiz. My cooperating teacher incorporated weekly homework quizzes to assess the students' homework after the first six weeks of the semester. Last year North was on a block schedule, and this year the school is now on a seven period day. My cooperating teacher was checking homework everyday by using a stamp sheet, and found it difficult to check homework everyday. My cooperating teacher decided to implement homework quizzes because another teacher in her Professional Learning Community (PLC) recommended the weekly homework quizzes. I decided to continue using the homework quiz since I was teaching for a short period. I did not know about homework quizzes until I came to North Salem High School. On my second day of teaching I administered a homework quiz, and right after I passed the quiz students asked for the Area Quiz. I was surprised that majority of the class did not fill out the homework quiz. Majority of the sheets that I received back were blank and one student wrote, "I don't know!" on her paper. I planned to give a homework quiz the week of Veteran's Day, but I ran out of time. I decided not to give a homework quiz and combine the homework with the next week. After I noticed the student's struggling with completing the homework quiz, I decided to have problems on the homework quiz that I somehow covered in a warm-up or practice problem. The purpose of the homework quiz is not to make students feel incompetent, but to encourage them to practice the concepts and skills from the lesson. I want to look at a homework quiz and not only see which students did the homework, but which students understand the material and can show their work leading to their answers. The homework quiz that I gave the students the Thursday before Thanksgiving Break showed me that some students tried the problems, and some students I knew who did the work did not turn it in. Even though I tried my best to incorporate some of the problems in the lessons I noticed some students still did not attempt the homework quiz, but I noticed more students completed and tried problems on the homework quiz despite if they did the homework or not.
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