Assessment Rationale

Dori Podrabsky

As an incoming teacher I have many beliefs about how students learn best.  I believe that students learn best when the curriculum is relevant and interesting.  Curriculum that is relevant helps students to relate what they are learning to other experiences.  This gives students the ability to connect what they are learning in a classroom to what is happening in their personal lives.  Keeping curriculum interesting keeps students engaged in what they are learning.  Teachers must aid the students in content areas in which the students’ struggle.  A good way to accomplish this is by keeping the students interest level high.  I also believe that students must build on their current knowledge and the best way to do that is with scaffolding.  Using collaborative techniques to get students to work together and learning from each other can increase students’ understanding.  Modeling is another technique that scaffolds the content students are learning.  With this scaffolding and building on their current knowledge, students must transfer the knowledge they have learned to use in the world after they graduate.  Without this, students may only be able to regurgitate facts but not use them.  These three key theoretical beliefs work together to help students get the most out of instruction.

In order to better inform my teaching strategies I will need to use assessments that align with my beliefs about how students learn best.  In making the assessments interesting and relevant, it is extremely important to be aware of wording in my assessments, avoiding stereotypical or offensive language.  Students may see stereotypical or offensive wording in an assessment and, “their resultant distress may lead to less than optimal performances…”(Popham, 113)  In this instance the assessment would show bias and therefore lose reliability and validity (Popham, 112). 

Both the pre-test and formative assessments that I administer will help inform me of what my students know and understand or conversely, what they don’t know or understand about the topics that I am teaching.  With the data from the pre-test I can determine what, if anything, that the students already know.  Moreover, this information can help me differentiate instruction for those students that do understand and those that need more help.  After analysis of my formative assessments, I will use the data to direct my instructional strategies to better teach my students and to better scaffold the content for my students if necessary.

In the performance assessment and post-test I will be able to check for whether students have transferred the content knowledge and understanding to real-world applications.  This is extremely important to me in my content area of math because I feel that historically students have been taught the steps to follow but have not been shown how this applies to them, the real world or to them in the real world.

There are many obstacles in the way of teachers, some of which the education system is in control of.  One of these is the amount of time available to teach and therefore assess.  With budget cuts taking days away from physical days in school, the amount of time needed to assess students well is difficult to carve out of our already decreased instructional time.  Another effect of budget cuts is a lack of resources.  This could affect availability of key materials or funding for field trips that could help a teacher create interest and relevance for the students.  This lack of funding for field trips could also affect whether students will be exposed to real life experiences.  For example, at one time there was funding for biology students to take a field trip to the Oregon Coast to go whale watching.  This real life experience which creates relevance, gives a teacher a chance to scaffold learning in a fun and interesting way and helps students transfer their in-class learning to the real-world; this has been eliminated due to budget cuts.  Not only does this lack of funding take away from a rewarding experience, it takes away from a chance to assess students in the real world.  This would have been a wonderful opportunity for an authentic performance assessment.  Another obstacle that teachers face is the seemingly constant stream of assessments by either the state or the school districts.  Ironically, the need to determine whether a teacher is effective gets in the way of the teacher being effective.   In my practicum experience face time with students was lacking.  This was a major contributing factor of low assessment scores.  With the A-B schedule of the school I was assigned to and the month that I was given to accomplish the ten hours of instructional time, I taught eight days, every B day in the month that I was there.  Seeing students so sporadically, three days one week, two the next created a situation that necessitated daily remediation of the subject matter.  Another factor was that during my month of instructional time the students had a week off for conferences and Thanksgiving vacation.

In my class there are several students on individual education plans (IEP’s).  There are three different themes in these IEP’s.  The first of these is transition skills with three students having difficulty with transitioning between activities.  The second theme affects three students as well.  Their behavioral skills need to be monitored to keep them on task.  The third accommodation is for hearing impairment.  These students may need different accommodation depending on their individual needs.  This may be extra time taking tests, a “quiet” area in which to take the test, or oral assessments to determine their learning.  Other students in my class will struggle.  My goal is for all students to learn the material that I am teaching.  Therefore, it is important to me to give all students the support they need to accomplish this goal.  

Another situation where I would need to make accommodation is with absenteeism.  During my practicum experience there were several students that were absent.  One boy in particular spent time at Doernbecher’s Hospital trying to determine the cause of his illness.  When he did return it was on a half-day basis.  Although he attended class, his illness affected him substantially.  It would be unfair to assess his learning the same as his peers.  He did not have the same opportunity to learn the material.  This would be the case where I would give a quick informal assessment to check for the students’ understanding.  At that point I would make a determination of whether the student is ready to be assessed.  If I felt the student understood the material I would assess him the same as his peers; in the opposite case I would be available to teach him the material.  It is important to me that all students receive the best education that I can provide them.  This means that I will do everything that it takes to help a student achieve all that they are willing to work for.  I will be available to all students before school, after school and via email. 

To increase my instructional quality I created several assessments in the format of constructed response.  These assessments will inform me as to whether my students are learning the objectives I have set for them.  In my pre-test there will be eight questions.  My beliefs of scaffolding and using real world scenarios are reflected in these assessments.  The questions build upon each other with three of the questions using the same information to increase the scaffold effect.  The last question is one that will inform me of whether I have given instruction to support the understanding of real world situations.  Embedded in the questions in my pre-test are the four objectives that I am teaching.  These objectives are in direct support of the Oregon Department of Education Standards for high school mathematics, specifically algebra.

For my formative assessments that will inform me of the effectiveness of my instruction I will have two different forms.  These assessments will use questions similar to the ones on my pre-test, and will give me an understanding of whether my students are grasping the concepts that I am teaching.  If necessary, I can go back and scaffold the content differently.  My formative assessments will be given after I have covered the content of each objective.  The first and last objectives will be assessed in the format of an exit slip.  The second and third objectives are combined and are assessed in a warm-up.  Each of these assessments will be used to inform my instruction to give me the data of which skills and objectives that I will need to scaffold in a different way for my students.

After my first formative assessment I changed my instructional strategy and began using the thumbs-up, thumbs-sideways, thumbs-down method of informal assessment.  With the data from formative assessment #1 and this informal method of assessment, I was better able to utilize the resources of the top third of the class.  During class discussion, I chose some of that top third to answer my questions.  This was a way of scaffolding the content in a different way to increase learning for the rest of the class.  Another modification that I made after analysis of formative assessment #1 was to include a multiple choice question and a matching items question on formative assessment #2.  After carefully considering the pros and cons of this, I decided that the level of Bloom’s Taxonomy that I was expecting students to be able to perform at was too ambitious at the time.  Included in this second formative assessment were the original questions at the higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  This affected positively the formative assessment #2 scores. 

For formative assessment #3 I stayed with my original questions.  The scores from this assessment caused me to be unsure of whether my instruction of the unit had been successful.  At this time I changed my strategies again to better model and therefore scaffold the content of the unit.  I accomplished this by using the method of “I do, you do, we do.”  For several different math problems I first showed the students how to go about solving the systems of equations.  In this I was transparent with the students as to what I was doing in every step.  I then had them try a similar problem on their own.  After allowing them the time to attempt the problem, we came together as a class to work through the problems.  During this discussion, different students were talking through their thought processes modeling for their fellow students.  

For my post-test the questions are in the same format as the pre-test, except with different numbers plugged in.  This will help me to validate the findings from the assessments.  It will also show me whether my instruction was effective and if the students achieved the objectives set forth.  My beliefs about learning are reflected in my last assessment because I am utilizing the pre-test for my post-test.

All of my assessments, pre-test, formative assessments and post-test will be in the format of constructed response with the exception of formative assessment #2 which has included a multiple choice and a matching items question as well.  I will have eight days on a block schedule with 88 minute periods to teach an entire chapter to my students.  In the interest of time I am using the post-test as my performance assessment.  This is acceptable because according to Popham (1995) “any time you assess your students by asking them to respond in other than a make-a-choice manner, the students are constructing; that is, they are performing.” 

With the data collected from the different assessments I was able to adapt my teaching to the needs of my students.  This is a clear case of using assessment for learning, in “which the first priority in its design and practice is to serve to purpose of promoting pupils’ learning.” (Popham, 11)

References

Popham, W.J. (1995). Classroom assessment: what teachers need to know. Boston, MA: Pearson Education

Uses of Assessment

Feedback to Students

Although my students never saw their test scores my assessments were useful to my students.  The inferences that I made from the data that I gathered helped to inform my teaching strategies. I was able to look at the test scores and realize that my students still had not reached a level of learning that I was satisfied with.  As such, I changed my plan to increase the students’ understanding of the content.  Data that I gathered after this verifies that the change in technique did in fact make a positive difference for students.

Feedback to Parents

During my practicum Sprague High School had Fall Conferences.  At these conferences I was able to meet some of the parents of my students.  As parents were asking questions of my supervising teacher I observed.  When a parent of a student in my class had a question about how their student was doing, my supervising teacher looked to me to fill in the gaps for the parents.  Several times I referred to assessments to either confirm that the student was making progress or to show the parent that the student needed to work a little harder. 

Reflection on Teaching

The assessment plan that I put together was not the best for this particular group of students.  There were many reluctant learners in my class; some of whom had taken the class before.  Most of my assessments were at the application level (C3) of Blooms Taxonomy.  Looking back, my expectation for students was higher than they were capable of giving me at the time.  As a new teacher I believed that my assessments should scaffold the content conceptually, one question building on the question before.  The results of the data from my assessments show an anomaly in Formative Assessment #2.  This test was my attempt to bring the cognitive level down to comprehension (C2) and to give the students a test in a format they were more comfortable with.  This strategy was helpful for my students.  I made a rookie mistake; instead of staying with this format and adding on to it, I went back to my original plan.   A developmentally scaffolded assessment plan would have been more  effective to truly assess what my students knew, using more multiple choice and match questions, which the students are familiar with.  I believe that with this change in plan, I would have been more successful in instructing students.  This would also help get student buy-in for the assessment.

Another reflection on the data is that between Formative Assessment #2 and Formative Assessment #3 there was a one week break for Thanksgiving.  When students return from a break this long, often a teacher must re-teach previously learned content.  Giving Formative Assessment #3 on the Monday after the break gave me an idea of how far back I would have to go to bring the students back to the level they were before the break.

Using the data from Formative Assessment #3 I decided to use the “I do, you do, we do” method of scaffolding.  Without this method of instruction my students’ scores on the Post-Test would have been much lower.  Employing this method, I worked through problems and explained every step I made.  After this I had the students do the same type of problem on their own for a few minutes.  We then came together to work the problem.  During this time I had students that I believed would have the answer correct talk through the way they understood it.  This was another way to scaffold the content for other students.   

Although I labored over wording and format to make my assessments as valid as possible, the second question of the Pre-Test was actually worded carefully, yet the students did not read the directions; this was repeated on Formative Assessment #1.  Students became accustomed to my assessments, so this did not affect the Post-Test.  This is something that will help me to accurately assess students in the future.