Assessment

Welcome back to my final math blog for year 2!  I can't believe that we have come to an end in our math journey together.  Time certainly does fly!

For my final blog, we will be focusing on assessment.   What is the right way to assess our students?  Well, this week's class gave us many examples of what not to do.   I guess we can thank Mr. D for that!

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One tip that stuck with me was about focusing on the comments and not the grade.   The first thing that students look at when you give them a test back is the letter or number grade at the top of the page.  Everyone does this, me included.  The problem is , that is all the students will care about.  Comments are so much more important because the student will be able to identify their strengths and their next steps.  That is what the purpose of assessment is! To improve student learning.  Comments can help to improve student learning while grades won't have the same effect.




A great resource to go to for assessment is the document, "Growing Success".  Here we can find the seven principles of assessment that we should all keep in mind when in our placements and eventually as in- service teachers.

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Another important concept that we learned about this week was triangulation to report progress.  This consists of collecting evidence of time from three different sources:
1) observations
2) conversations
3) student products
Why do you think that teachers use this method to report student progress?  Because using multiple sources of evidence increases the reliability and the validity of the evaluation of learning. 


This week's mindset modules demonstrated that math is all around us.  Using the Fibonacci spiral, we were able to see that the mathematical spirals could fit anywhere in nature, architecture, the arts and really in anything you can imagine.

We learned that technology is an important component to math.  Good apps should not only be engaging to our students but should bring math concepts to life.  Students should be able to interact with the technology in order to bring a higher level of understanding to math concepts.  The apps should be connected to the curriculum and allow for differentiated instruction, since not all students are at the same level in math. 

Finally, we learned about how important it is to create a positive learning environment that really brings math to life for our students.   A common theme throughout this course is the importance of creating a meaningful, engaging, and dynamic math classroom for our students. In this way, they will have the opportunity to become engaged in math, to explore ideas and make connections, and to develop a deeper and more meaningful understanding of math without feeling embarrassed about making mistakes.   We have learned that the way to grow our brains is by making mistakes and therefore we as educators,  should  always encourage a positive growth mindset in our classrooms.

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