Dyana_Journal+9

Dyana Brown Assessment Journal 9 Today, the teacher gave the students a summative assessment of chapter 10 in the mathematics unit. The unit had to do with patterns and number skipping. The students were each given a piece of paper that was provided from the curriculum of enVision mathematics. There were ten multiple choice questions and the assessment was given to the entire class at the same time. Each student was given an “office,” which was a three-fold cardboard stand that stood on each student’s desk so that they would not look at each other’s work. The teacher read each question aloud to the students and they had to fill in the appropriate bubble that fit the answer to the question. An example of one of the questions was, “count the number of arms on the stars and fill in the bubble that has the correct total number of arms.” This question also asked the students to use their “skip counting” skills in order to quickly answer this question. So, since there were five arms on one of the stars, and there were seven stars, the students had to count the stars by fives in order to answer the question. There were a lot of factors that bothered me about this particular assessment and the way that the questions were worded and displayed for the children. First, the sheet of paper is long and is usually folded in half like a booklet for the students. The teacher just wanted the students to not fold the paper and keep it facing up on one side, which was the side that the exam was on. Second, I recall my cooperating teaching mentioned that not once, did the worksheets prior to the assessment ever word a questions asking the students to “skip count.” This new term on the summative assessment bothered me and my cooperating teacher. Next, I knew that all of the students in the class knew how to count by fives; but, for some reason, when I was walking around the room, I noticed that all of the students were counting each individual arm on the stars. When they messed up their counting, they started again. I guess my cooperating teacher noticed this as well because she kept reiterating that they should skip count by the amount of arms on the first stars. For some reason, some of the students could not grasp this new sentence. Another question asked the students to complete the table’s pattern of numbers. For instance, in the particular question, the pattern was a pattern of counting by twos. Again, the question was worded in a way or in a format (the table) that must have confused the students because some of the students were not filling in the correct bubble. Of course this type of assessment is a formal and traditional way of assessing student work and it is also reliable, but this is by no means, a valid way. If I was the teacher reading the questions for the students, and I did not have an extra set of eyes to see how the students went back and forth answering the questions, I would not be as opposed to this type of test as I currently am. If I were the teacher, I guess I would not have that much of an option to change the assessment if this was the required mathematic curriculum used by the district; however, I might have continued to assess the students with the same topic in a different, more informal way so that I know that the students understand skip counting so that I can move on to the next topic. I could even rephrase the questions in a way so that the students are more familiar with the wording so that they are not surprised and confused by new vocabulary.