Thursday, February 7, 2013
Assessment
At any level of Mathematics assessment is very important. Everyone has heard the saying, "to learn math, you must do math". As a high school math teacher I must remember that students will need to practice, practice, practice. With that said, I must keep in mind that the practice needs to be evaluated. There are many different ways to assign math work to students. Considering the fact that a lot of students do not enjoy math, I must find ways to interest everyone. Assessments can be good for the student but even more valuable for teachers. Formal and informal assessments can be used throughout the year to monitor progress. A very important informal assessment could be unannounced quizzes. I feel like that checking students' progress via pop-quizzes will help me assure that students do not fall behind. I do not feel that each quiz would be graded necessarily. The purpose of such a quiz would simply be for me to check progression. Another informal assessment could be checking homework problems occasionally. Yet another way to assess informally would be to have the students write down a real life application of the theory or topic that I covered during the class period. An exit pass could also be used to allow students to express concern, ask questions, or answer a brief question.You can check out more examples on this webpage. Obviously, we have to use formal assessment to prepare students for the standardized tests and for grading. The most used formal assessment could be a planned exam covering a certain unit. The state and nation uses different standardized tests to place students in proper courses and to assess the knowledge learned over an entire semester. In math I will more than likely have constant formal assessments in the way of worksheets or problems from the book. I could mix formal and informal with these assignments by grading a pre-determined set of problems or not telling the students which problems will be graded for correctness. I could also use different games as a formal assessment. Grouping into teams and performing required skills could allow for kinesthetic involvement as well as a good way to assess the students' knowledge.
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I agree with all what you said in terms of the different types of assessment and I like (and may use) the idea of using an exit pass to learn what students understand and don't understand through out the year, because some students don't feel comfortable asking questions in the middle of the class in fear of being judged so this will give them the opportunity to ask for further explanation.
ReplyDeleteI also recommend to add competition between the students buy putting a problem on the board and see who can solve the problem first correctly every once in a while.
I like your idea of pop quizzes that don't have to be graded - but you get into issues with test anxiety there, even if it's good to assess them and give them practice n taking tests. An idea to counteract this might be having a clicker pop quiz using a clicker system - students really like using clickers and seeing their 'scores' in real-time, and it would help with having them solve problems and select an answer like they might do on their EOCs.
ReplyDeleteI like your ideas of assessment! Math is definitely an important subject for you to evaluate students' progress frequently, probably daily. You should make homework mandatory; I had a math teacher that didn't make it mandatory, and I did worse in that class than any other because he didn't really check our progress as we went along.
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