Skip to main content

A thought about assessment

 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. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I'm LOVING portfolios in my fully remote classroom

 I meant to blog in August but, you know, school started and all of that! We are starting fully remote.  I could not have been prepared for how different, awkward, and exhausting online learning would be. The energy during class is extremely different than when you're in a classroom, which makes my portfolios that much more needed.  Some background: 1:1 with chromebooks this year 6 periods this semester Periods 1-3 M/W from 9-12 Periods 4-6 T/Th from 9-12 The afternoons are for asynchronous work time, teacher office hours, small group intervention, and extra AP blocks.  Fridays we have advisory, an all school meeting, and will have time for clubs to meet. Daily Plan: Each morning I post a "Daily Links" google doc (thanks to my twitter friends for this idea!). The students open it before class. This helps us bypass the "no live links in the chat on chromebooks" issue 🙄 We start the class with a warm up problem that I screen share. The students respond in the ch...

Farewell to 2020: Another Ode to Desmos and the #mtbos

 I tried to blog every month this year, but remote learning and grad school classes kept me from it. How fitting is it for this school year that I waited until the absolute last day of the year to write my final blog post?? We can all agree this was a weird year. There were days where my anxiety levels reached the highest points they ever have. I think I have officially had every physical symptom of anxiety that exists this year. But I know that overall, I had it pretty good in 2020. My family and I stayed healthy, we found ways to stay connected, and I was able to spend lots of time with my husband and dog. I also learned a lot about my biases and my privilege this year, and I'm thankful for the ways I was challenged to work on these.  When I think back on this year, I can't imagine how much different it would have been without twitter. I love how teachers came together to support each other this year. And without the many teachers I have the chance to collaborate with, I can...