Rubric Used for Pre and Post Assessment

All questions are scored on a scale of 0-3 points

The biggest way I determined learning gains was by looking at each question individually (I combined questions 1 and 2 on the post assessment because they were essentially the same question with different numbers). Because I scored each question on my rubric from 0-3 I could see definite conceptual gains. Almost every student attempted every problem. If you just wrote something down I scored it as a 1. On top of that almost every student showed a correct conceptual understanding when I examined how he or she set up the equations. What I discovered was that most of the errors made were calculation errors, not conceptual ones. Because I set up my rubric in such a way that students are rewarded for some understanding and not just overall correctness, I feel very confident that the test scores from pre to post show learning gains. My students are by no means masters of this topic, but based on the skills they demonstrated on the post assessment, all except one of them met my goals and objectives for the unit, and the one student who did not meet, still made incredible learning gains from pre to post assessment.

To help me further assess whether or not my students were meeting my goals and objectives, I used formative assessments:

The formative assessments that I used for my unit consisted mostly of exit cards. At the end of every lesson I had each student fill out a note card with at least one thing they learned that day or better understood that day. I did this because I really wanted them to identify their own learning. Also if a student could not find something that they learned, I knew that I needed to change something I was doing as a teacher to better help that student. This formative assessment also helped me as a teacher to see if my lessons were really aligned with my objective for the lesson. If a student wrote down that they learned something entirely different from what my objective was, then I knew that I needed to re-work what I was doing. Also as a benefit to them, if they could state one or more things that they learned, they are more likely to remember that they learned it, so when they had questions I could refer back to what they had written, and saying, “remember when you learned this…” had more meaning to the student.

            The other formative assessment I used was a quick problem at the beginning of class. Sometimes when they would come into class I would write a problem on the board and have them solve it on a piece of paper and hand it in to me. I did not score these problems but rather, used them as a tool for me to determine whether or not the class was ready to move on to the next lesson, and what students needed extra help. These problems were tied to my daily lesson plan objectives, and they were used to check understanding of these objectives. My daily lesson plan objectives were stepping stones to achieve my overall goals for the unit, so these formative assessments were used as checkpoints. Like I said before however, they were not graded, so they were mostly used to provide me with useful information on whether or not I was adequately covering a topic. In the slideshow in this section are some examples of the formative assessments I used to help shape my lesson plans and determine whether or not the students in my class were meeting my goals and objectives.