Daily Eureka Math

Formative Assessments

Introduction

Eureka Math includes multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding daily in the form of fluency, concept development, problem sets, and exit tickets. Each stage of the lesson acts as a way for me to check student progress throughout individual lessons and to provide fast, actionable feedback to my students. I uses these stages as formative assessments to gage if students are able to apply the knowledge they demonstrate through hands on activities to complete a worksheet where they must extrapolate on these skills and prove a deeper understanding through written response. If students struggle with a skill in the lesson, they may need extra support before attempting the next mid-module or end of module assessment and this will inform my future instructional choices.

Fluency Activities

Each Eureka lesson begins with a fluency activities. These might be in the form of quick response worksheets, or more commonly solo, partner, or whole group activities. Fluency activities are meant to be quick warmups, but they also provide an opportunity for me to see which students are still struggling with basic counting and cardinality concepts.

This fluency worksheet acts as a quick warm up where students can prove their ability to count and write up and down from three. If a student struggles with this skill, I may pull them for remediation during centers time to practice counting and writing numbers.

This is an example of a fluency game played in partners. Each pair has a number line from 1-10 and a counter. Partner A puts the counter on one number while Partner B covers their eyes. Then Partner B tried to guess which number is being covered up, using counting or their knowledge of number order.

Concept Development

This is the main content of the lesson and varies day to day, but is usually heavy on student use of manipulatives to learn a new concept. Students will have an opportunity to prove related knowledge of these new skills through their answers to the problem set and exit ticket at the end of the lesson. These written responses help me see how much my students learned during the concept development.

Here is an example of a whole group hands-on activity where students use cubes on a five-group piece of paper to see how five and another number can be added together to make a larger number. In this lesson, students were using manipulatives to make the number nine, and then matching the number nine to their numeral card labelled "9". This connects to the standard K.CC.4 "Understand the relationship between numbers and quantities; connect counting to cardinality", which is a key skill repeated and built upon throughout the year (National Governors Association, 2010).

Problem Sets and Exit Tickets

By administering problem sets and exit tickets daily I can observe which students are showing progress mastering our concept development skills and which students may need remediation before moving on. In this way, I can quickly assess student progress and begin remediation before the more formal mid-module and end of module assessments are given.

Here is the problem set related to the concept development displayed above. Here, students use the same skill of breaking down the number 9 by thinking of it as 5 and some more. This is the same skill they practiced earlier with cube manipulatives, only formatted on paper so that students have practice expressing their understanding in a variety of ways.

This exit ticket was an opportunity for students to show how they can independently sort objects by category. This relates directly to a question on our mid-module assessment, so if students perform well on this exit ticket, then I know that they are prepared for the assessment. This allows me to monitor their progress and provide remedial instruction for this skill as necessary.

Here is another example of an exit ticket where students can quickly prove their knowledge of counting in a way that connects to the concept development. This student finished the assignment early, and while I was helping their classmates with this skill, they were given the additional task of coloring the objects in a variety of patterns. In this way, they could complete an extension activity while their classmates finished the assignment.

Conclusion

Each stage of our Eureka lessons provides an opportunity to check for student understanding. These can vary from reviewing fluency worksheets and activities, to verifying understandings of new concept development skills through completion of problem sets and exit tickets. If students are struggling to master a particular skill, I can have them repeat the task or attempt it in a different way immediately and assess their understanding throughout the lesson. I can also notice if a large number of students are struggling with a skill through their problem sets and exit tickets and use this data to choose which lessons I might retest during our schedule flex days. My students are aware of their progress with our problem sets as I circulate and monitor their answers, using a marker to give them a check if they have mastered all skills, or marking an answer they need to reconsider and giving them a hint on how to fix it. Once they complete all skills correctly, they are given extra practice work such as writing numbers or creating their own story problems so that I can check back in with classmates who may still be struggling.

Return to District Diagnostic Math Assessment Continue to Mid-Module and End of Module Assessments

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Resources

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards Kindergarten. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/K

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