Susan Dachenhausen's Personalized Learning Portfolio

Many times in a classroom a teacher may be asked, "Why do I have to know this?", "When will I ever have to use this in my life?" "What is the point of this?" Learning is a life-long skill that doesn't stop once you are done with school. Our everyday life and careers in the real world force us to never stop learning the newest techniques to better our career and world. This learning begins in the classroom with authentic and adaptive assessments.

Authentic and Adaptive Assessments are vital to a personalized learning classroom environment. Adaptive assessments inform a teacher of each students level in their own personal learning paths. This helps a teacher know where to meet the student in order to continue helping the student set goals, challenge the student, and work with the student to achieve the goals. Authentic Assessments are used to help students understand the "why are we learning this" and apply it in a real world context. They take a student from the beginning of Bloom's taxonomy with just having to memorize and recall to higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy with synthesizing, analyzing, and applying their learned concepts to other situations.

Adaptive Assessments

"The advantage of an adaptive test is that it is customized, providing a better measure of achievement by offering questions that are specifically targeted to each student's ability level. High-performing students are not bored by breezing through items that are too easy for them, and lower-performing students are not discouraged by slogging their way through a large set of items that are too difficult." (ASCD).

Video Credit: Centre for Evaluation & Monitoring. 17 July, 2020.

There are many different adaptive assessment options that districts can choose to use for their schools. Adaptive assessments are important in determining exactly where a student may be in their personal learning path. How an adaptive assessment works is that a student begins with a question. If the student answers correctly, then the adaptive assessment will adjust the next question to be more difficult or challenging. If the student answers incorrectly, then the adaptive assessment will adjust the next question to be less difficult or challenging. "Better targeting of student ability means that adaptive tests can give more accurate ability measurements, and fewer questions are required compared to traditional ‘flat’ tests." (Cambridge CEM).

Video Credit: Veluz, Venice Kay-Ann. 7 Dec, 2020.

Authentic Assessments

Authentic assessments are important in helping students be able to take their knowledge and apply it in a context that can be applied to real world. "An authentic assignment is one that requires application of what students have learned to a new situation, and that demands judgment to determine what information and skills are relevant and how they should be used. Authentic assignments often focus on messy, complex real-world situations and their accompanying constraints; they can involve a real-world audience of stakeholders or “clients” as well." (Indiana University Bloomington).

"Authentic assessments allow students to find a way to demonstrate their knowledge that best suits them. By giving students an opportunity to apply their knowledge rather than simply recalling it to answer a question on the test, authentic assessment often tells a teacher more about how much the student really understands. It also allows the students to deepen their understanding and construct new meaning from what they already know because authentic assessment requires more analysis and synthesis of information." (Williams, D). A math authentic assessment could be creating your own packing container for a shipping company to make sure that it is able to fit the volume needed to be the most cost efficient. A science authentic assessment could be helping a company like Club Car in Augusta, GA to design an accessory that is powered by electrical circuits to make their golf cars more marketable for specific regions of the US. Authentic assessments take the knowledge being learned and not just memorize facts, but truly apply their understanding to meet a real world problem.

Preparing Learners to Self Assess

Portfolio:

In my classroom, students work hard each day to progress in their learning and work towards mastery of their standards. Our fifth grade students are given a portfolio template using Google Sites to upload their artifacts to show mastery of the standards. I have included below an example of the template used by our 5th grade students. Each student receives their own copy at the beginning of the year and over the course of the year, they are to upload artifacts that show mastery of the standard listed. Portfolios are important to help students really learn to self-assess because they are having to pick the artifacts that truly show they have mastered the material or standard. This makes them evaluate their own work to decide if it shows mastery. Portfolios "can be class-based, project-based, or unique to the student. These individual collections of work help students document their learning and reflect on progress over time, facilitate effective assessment for teachers, and/or create a final showcase of their strongest work." (Carvalho, B. 2020).

Video Credit: John Spencer, @spencereducation (November 12, 2020)

Reflections:

As students progress in their learning, it is important to work with each student on learning how to reflect on their assignments, projects, and progression. I have included to the right an example of a self-reflection Google Form that my students fill out after each assignment, project, or personalized learning plan. Students are learning how to self assess and to think more deeply about not only their "grade" but the learning that took place. Some questions are what struggles did you face and how did you overcome those. Another question asks students to reflect on their strengths through that assignment. It is important for students to reflect back over their learning and not only focus on if they were able to master the material, but how they disciplined themselves, broke through struggles, and how their strengths were an aid.

Multiple Means of Demonstration

FlipGrid Choice:

Flipgrid is a way for students to use voice as a means of demonstration. Flipgrid is an online platform where a teacher can pose a video question or just pose questions in the description and students are able to respond using video responses. I have used Flipgrid in math class for students to showcase their mathematical thinking on a specific problem. A math practice standard is constructing viable arguments. Students are able to share their argument for their answer using Flipgrid.

Flipgrid is also a great collaboration tool that can be used between students, or between stakeholders. Another use of Flipgrid is students being able to create a video reflection on their assignment. For example, students can use Flipgrid to post a video detailing all the information they have obtained about circuits. Students could use Flipgrid as choice for creating a video podcast as a means of demonstration.

Unit 3 CreateaPersonalBudget5thGradeMath.pdf

Authentic PBL:

An authentic assessment or task that can really provide students to be creative, think critically, collaborate together, and communicate with peers and others is a PBL or Project Based Learning Task. For most units in math, my students complete PBL's where students have to apply the learned content of the standard to a real world context situation. To the left, I provided an example that I used from Performing in Education. This specific PBL was designed for students to work with decimals in creating their own budget. Students will have to pick a career either from the list provided or research their own career and find the salary. Next, students will budget for most all living expenses that includes housing, car, groceries, wants, and needs. This really helps them not only just know how to complete decimal operations, but how it can be used in a real world setting.

Choice Board:

For my unit on Microorganisms, students were able to choose at the of how they wanted to present their mastery of the standard. Some of the choices were being able to choose between writing a story about a hero microorganism and a villain microorganism, or they could write a comic strip about the hero microorganism and the villain microorganism. Another choice was a research presentation where they pick a place in the world that is really affected by microorganisms to their people and environment.

Microorganism Assessment Choice Board

EV Comic Strip

Another was being able to create an anchor chart for my artistic students. This choice board was great for my students to be able to apply their strengths to show their demonstration of knowledge on the standard. Pictured to the left is an example of one of my student's final project of creating their own comic strip. She had hero microorganisms of the lactobacillus guys versus the E.Coli twins. The student was able to demonstrate from our standard that she mastered the understanding that there are beneficial microorganisms and harmful microorganisms. She was able to show how the harmful microorganisms can affect a human by getting sick.

Assessing Learners

Diagnostic

Winter Diagnostic.pdf

Our district uses iReady for our diagnostic assessments and our math curriculum. iReady provides an adaptive diagnostic assessment. An adaptive assessment will adjust its questions for each student based on the responses from the previous questions. As a student answers questions correctly, it will adjust to harder questions. As a student answers incorrectly, it will adjust to less difficult questions. Diagnostic assessments are given at the beginning of the year, middle of the year, and end of the year. They give teachers an overview of each student and a breakdown of different domains. The results can show a teacher the level of each individual student. This helps with developing learning plans for each student and creating their own paths based on their individual diagnostic scores. From this diagnostic assessment, an individualized path is created for students to begin closing gaps in their learning.

Summative

Math Summative

Summative assessments can be presented in multiple ways. One way is having a unit assessment that tests multiple standards within a given unit or module. Our county uses Illuminate for our end of unit summative assessments. After students take the unit assessment, reports are generated that break down standard mastery, lowest performing questions, and our subgroup achievement gaps.

Another type of summative assessment can be a PBL where students have to apply what they have learned into a real world context. For example, after learning about decimal operations, students have to create a personal budget from a given salary. Students must learn how to manage their money with purchases of a car, house, and groceries. A summative PBL can show if a student is able to take their knowledge and apply it to another situation reaching a higher DOK level.

Formative

Formative assessments are for teachers to check on student's progression towards mastery of standards. The data helps drive instruction for the next day. Formative assessments can be a quick exit ticket that can check for understanding. It can be a 10 question quiz. Formative assessments are vital to teachers being able to monitor understandings of the content being instructed. Google Forms is a great tool to use for formative assessments because you can build your own assessment and also weigh certain questions using point values. Above you can see a formative assessment that was used in my science classroom to assess students' knowledge of animal classification for vertabrates and invertabrates. This gives me a snapshot of how each student is progressing, but also gives me data on my teaching of the content.

References

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. (2014, March 1). The Potential of Adaptive Assessment. ASCD.
Retrieved January 28, 2023, from https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-potential-of-adaptive-assessment

Cambridge CEM. (2020, June 17). 5 Reasons to Use Adaptive Tests. Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring. Cambridge University Press and Assessment. Retrieved from https://www.cem.org/blog/5-reasons-to-use-adaptive-tests

Carvalho, Bryan. (2020, May 4). What is a portfolio for the classroom? SpacesEDU.

Indiana University Bloomington. (n.d.). Authentic Assessment. Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning.
Retrieved January 28, 2023, from https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/assessing-student-learning/authentic-assessment/

Williams, D. (2017, September 26). What Are the Advantages of Authentic Assessment Over Standardized Testing? Retrieved February 5, 2023 from https://www.theclassroom.com/similarities-difference-classroom-test-standardized-achievement-test-15626.html

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