We use a variety of tools to know your students' current math skills, conceptual understanding, and fluency throughout the year. We use the information we elicit from those tools to meet your students' specific learning needs in the classroom. For us, assessments are about learning not grades. Grading happens at the very end of learning and is as much a reflection on our ability to teach as it is a reflection on a particular students' ability to learn.
Some of our assessment tools can be found online. The Eureka and EngageNY assessments found online should never be used to support learning at home. Please do not print them for your students. If you find that your child has one of these assessments and is studying with it, you should take it away and contact your child's teacher to let them know. We use assessments to measure student learning and when a student uses the test to study from at home, their performance on the assessment is skewed. If they are struggling with the concepts but memorize answers to the test, their struggle will not be evident on the assessment. The teacher will not have a clear picture of that struggle, and the student may not receive the right supports to learn those concepts well in the classroom. The worst outcome for a student in our math classrooms is to not learn the mathematics. We need your support at home to ensure that teachers have an unblemished picture of each student's challenges in order to meet their needs in the classroom.
Assessment Tools in K-8 D205 Mathematics
- Exit Ticket - short daily assessment that elicits information about a student's learning from the day's lesson. Exit tickets are Eureka Math materials we provide to teachers.
- Classroom Observation - teachers routinely observe students doing mathematics. These information observations give us very useful information about student learning.
- Pre Module Assessment - The assessment at the beginning of a unit of instruction, sometimes called a "module." These assessments tell us whether a student has any mastery of the concepts the unit is designed to teach. We use data from these assessments to differentiate instruction to challenge students who may have mastered some or all of the content in the unit. These assessments were created as mirrors to the end of module assessments found on the Eureka and Engage NY websites.
- Mid Module Assessment - The assessment given at the middle of a unit of instruction. These assessments give us feedback on student learning in the middle of the learning process. We use that feedback to tailor instruction for students in the last half of the unit. These assessments are similar to the ones found on the Eureka and Engage NY websites.
- End Module Assessment - The assessment administered at the conclusion of a unit of instruction. These assessments are used to measure student learning at the end of the learning process in a particular unit. Information from this assessment can be used to support learning later in the year when we encounter similar concepts. These assessments are similar to the ones found on the Eureka and Engage NY websites.
- Quiz - Some teachers use periodic quizzes to measure student learning on specific standards. These are usually short assessments targeting a specific and limited set of standards. They are usually created by individual teachers or teams of teachers.
- Sprint - Operational Fluency is an important part of mathematics (though not the most important part). Teachers use daily fluency games and activities to practice operational fluency. Sprints are one of these activities, and they can also be used to measure a student's operation fluency relative to their current grade level. Sprints are Eureka Math materials we provide to teachers.