I had some thoughts about assessing my freshmen today after a particularly not great assessment last week 🙃 I wrote this all out in a thread and then thought “no, this should be a blog post!”.
Our school gets students from around 40(!!) different feeder schools. Yes, we’re a private school. Also, yes, the Milwaukee area has a wild amount of K-8 and middle schools.
(Maybe it’s just wild to me because it’s the opposite of where I grew up where there was one middle school and one high school 😅)
Because we get students from so many different schools, we also get students with a VERY wide range of prerequisite knowledge and skills. Example: today we covered how to find slope between two points. 2/3 of the room had at least seen it, 1/3 had never seen it. (I recognize most schools have students with a wide range of knowledge and skills and it’s not just us, but the amount of feeder schools we have is truly wild.)
Enter our summative assessments. Let me start by saying I haven’t found the best way to grade when you also have to grade the exact same as someone else. I hate the points system, but it’s also easy 😬 So for now, that’s what we’re doing. As you can guess, I’m not a fan of how the grades end up representing their progress with this current system.
Our last test was on functions and graphing linear functions. Most students did fine, some did horribly. I’m talking some kids got under 50% (and hot take, I don’t think a student should ever have under a 50% on a test without the teacher working with them to improve it and planning on that grade not staying that low, especially for freshmen who are still figuring how high school life works.)
Oh and guess what? The quarter ends this Friday 🙃 (side note, why the hell do we still grade with quarters??) Thankfully, we have “flex” time at the end of every school day. So I decided to pull the kids who got Ds and Fs, along with some students who messed up one topic.
I pulled each kid, one at a time, to talk through their tests. For the questions they got wrong, I tried to ask some clarifying questions. Through conversations with them I was able to discover if they knew more than they were able to put on paper. Guess what? Most of them knew a lot more than this one test showed.
After these conversations I adjusted their assessment scores accordingly. As I did that, I worried if some people (other teachers, admin) might think that I’m “helping them” too much. Maybe they will think that. But the way I see it, some students have an advantage that many of these students don’t have. Some students have been learning this content for YEARS while others have seen it for a couple of weeks. By providing this accommodation for my students, I feel that I am helping them to build a foundation not only in their content knowledge, but in their identities as math learners.
Is a test a better way of assessing than a simple conversation? Absolutely not. Is it time consuming? Yes. But was it worth it? Also yes.
As I strive to make assessment more equitable in my classroom, I hope to remember that my students deserve every chance to show their learning, even if it looks a little different from student to student. And I hope that I can bring other teachers along on this journey with me.
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