Formative Assessment

Hello fellow math buddies!

This week we covered a lot of ground regarding why and how we formatively assess our students. Though we have covered much of this in our assessment class, it was really nice to hear about it from a math perspective. As I have mentioned before in my blogs, I was not the "best" math student during my elementary and high schools years. However, because of this class, I am pretty confident not only in my math abilities, but in my teaching (math) abilities. Moving forward, these were this past week's activities at a glance...

The first activity that we participated in was a self-assessment. We worked as elbow partners to answer a few questions dealing with multiple math strands and difficulty. After completing the questions, we took up our answers, not in the "traditional" way, but by seeing the answer sheet and marking it ourselves! Personally, I love this type of marking. Not only do the students get to see how/if they went wrong, but they are also able to compare their own processes to that of the correct answer. I think that this is a great tool for students, as it allows them to reflect on their possible mistakes and learn from them! Also, this is amazing for teachers as well, as it gives them more time to plan other lessons and such, as the students are taking the time to mark assessments themselves!

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Another helpful part of this lesson was being able to determine activities that work for AS, FOR, and OF learning purposes. Regarding AS learning, in my opinion, holding pretests are an excellent way to determine just where your students are in math, and how you can help them to reach their full potential. Pretests almost set up a pathway for the unit, as it shows just exactly what the students know and don't know about a particular subject. I would have loved for my teachers to have given my math classes pretests! I found that all my math lessons worked like clockwork, however, many students were left behind because of how fast the classes were moving! If my teachers had given pretests, I might have felt that my teachers understood my strengths and weaknesses and how to help me with them. Regarding FOR learning, a great way to help students and teachers, is by using a strategy called "My Favourite No". At the beginning of class, students are given a math problem and are asked to solve it anonymously on cue-cards. The students hand their teacher their answers, and they are taken up a group. However, the teacher chooses a card that has the wrong answer, and walks the students through where they might have gone wrong or had difficulty with the problem. Much like our beginning activity, students would be able to see and correct their mistakes, and be able to document it for further reference. OF learning is a summative and formative process that takes as much work as possible of students, and uses it to determine a grade or skill mark (Progress Reports, end of unit projects, Report Cards).

There are many different ways to mark the above learning assessments, however, I'm going to focus on a strategy that I love to use, and loved to see on my reports and projects as a child. What I'm talking about is descriptive feedback. Sure, I loved seeing the marks on my projects or papers (well, only if they were decent marks...), but I also liked reading about how I could improve. I found that I liked constrictive criticism and descriptive feedback on my projects, as it fuelled me to do better for the next one, and helped me to see what else I could do to reach Level 4. As a pre-service teacher, I see that descriptive feedback can be something that helps a student immensely, whether it steers them in the right direction, or if it gives them the extra confidence they need. 

Honestly, I cannot wait to start assessing math homework, quizzes, and projects. I love to see how students' minds works, and how I can help them to understand and solve problems. As I have mentioned before, one of the best things to do regarding assessment ( and any subject in general!) is to keep an open mind and have a positive attitude.

Until the next blog, Happy Math-ing!

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