Doll_Assessment+1,2-4-09

One assessment done in the 5th grade classroom I am placed in was a Book Talk the students had to give. The students were given a rubric prior to creating their book talk with which the teacher evaluated them. The teacher had demonstrated how to give a good book talk, going over the rubric before and after she performed her book talk. She explained each section to them and pointed out where in her book talk she did that. Before students started their book talk, she gave them pointers one last time on what she would be looking for that day, like how loud they were speaking and how well they were keeping eye contact. She graded the students while they were presenting, making notes on their rubric.

The rubric is broken up into two sections: content and presentation. In the content section were things such as: introduced title and author twice, uses rich language, and interesting/memorable read-aloud section. In the presentation section was: loud and clear voice, reads/talks slowly, read passage (s) with fluency, and excellent eye contact. In ways to grade these, it was set up on a 4 point scale: 1-weak, 2-fair, 3-good, and 4-excellent. The teacher graded the students while they were doing it, but if she missed something in the content area, like if they mentioned the title twice, she asked either me or the student, since the students had what they were going to say written out roughly on note cards.

I feel this was a very fair assessment that was given to the students. The teacher clearly laid out her expectations by performing her own book talk and discussing it and providing the rubric to the students while they were putting their book talks together. She also provided feedback on the rubrics (she let me look at the ones I had seen done on that day). She did not just circle numbers and not say why, but she added comments to let the student know what they did either well or need to improve on. Of the ones I looked at, the students did very well on them. The students had a pre-planning sheet to help them know what to include in their content and were even given the index cards to write notes on for their presentation. I feel the teacher fully prepared them to include all the right things and gave them a very good example to follow if they wanted to succeed.

Kaitlyn <<Section 3