Assessment
Assessment
As a graduate of the Colgate teacher education program, I…
…use appropriate assessments to guide instruction; develop a fluid and reflective relationship between assessment and instruction.
*This section is copied from my college, pre-service teaching portfolio. One day I'll get around to revising.
I believe it is important for teachers to be conscious of the types of assessment strategies they are using, both formal and informal. I believe teachers do an injustice to their students, and to teaching in general, by adopting one mode of assessment as the primary tool for determining a student's worth in their class or grade on a report card. Informal strategies such as observation, frequent conversations with the students individually or in groups, and keeping running records of classroom behaviors and engagement with the material are useful because they give the teacher a sense of the child(ren)'s familiarity with the subject and alerts them of potential difficulties for the child(ren). While I tend to learn more about my students from observing their day-to-day interactions with math, I believe more formalized assessments are also sometimes needed to get a full picture of the mathematician's mind at work. I enjoy seeing my students' work on paper and learning from their sequence to solve a given math problem, for example. Formal assessments such as quizzes and exams are also needed, in my opinion, because they help prepare my adolescent students for life after high school when they will need test-taking strategies to help them through higher education or in the work-force where often there are guidelines for how to draft documents, complete tasks, and certainly follow instructions.
Below I have included examples of some of my assessment tools. Two links will lead you to jeopardy games that I created using PowerPoint and the others link to daily quizzes or unit exams, all of which I created and incorporated into my assessment during my professional semester student teaching. I also did "Proof on the Run" activities that had my students moving around the classroom in teams, filling in proofs on poster boards, math relays, and content surveys that helped me assess my own teaching in the classroom based on my students' critiques of me.
9th Grade Geometry of Triangles Exam
- This quiz was significant because most of my students failed the quiz, which signaled to me that I had not taught the material properly. In the next class period I went over the material a second time, giving the class multiple examples of how to put the material learned into use, and I included the questions from this quiz on the unit exam a week later to see if my re-lesson was a success. Fortunately a large percentage of the class received full credit on the problem once they saw it a second time which told me that I had modified my instruction successfully.