Embedded Files
learners demonstrate their learning through performance-based assessments and have opportunities to develop self-assessment and self-monitoring skills.
learners demonstrate their learning through performance-based assessments and have opportunities to develop self-assessment and self-monitoring skills.
FORMATIVE ASSESSMENTS, BENCHMARK ASSESSMENTS, SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENTS, & STUDENT SELF ASSESSMENT
Cahaba Elementary School has an assessment plan in which students demonstrate their STEM learning through three levels of performance based assessments including formative assessments, benchmark assessments, and summative assessments. All levels include assessment types that allow for public demonstrations of learning. Students use these leveled assessments to set goals, self monitor, self-assess, evaluate their own performance, and collaborate with teachers on next steps. Then, they participate in student-led conferences with their parents to report their progress, successes, and plans for improvement.
FORMATIVE ASSESSMENTS
FORMATIVE ASSESSMENTS
The first level of assessment in our assessment plan is formative assessment. Formative assessments measure students’ understanding of STEM concepts and ability to apply skills during and after a lesson. The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning and to provide ongoing feedback that can be used to improve instruction and improve students’ learning. Formative assessments help students recognize their strengths and weaknesses and identify areas in which they need to improve. It also helps teachers to recognize struggles and give immediate feedback. Our teachers use a variety of formative assessments, but they all fall into three major categories. These are quick checks, mission accomplished, and product assessments.
DURING THE LESSON - QUICK CHECK ASSESSMENTS
As students are learning a new concept or skill during a lesson, it is necessary to stop and check their understanding periodically as you are scaffolding their conceptual climb. In these circumstances, teachers use quick check assessments. Quick assessments are assessments of a student’s conceptual building process.
Performance Quick Checks
To assess mastery of skills, most teachers do performance assessments. The teacher simply observes whether the student can perform or apply a skill. If the student is struggling, the teacher immediately intervenes.
Picture Gallery
_________________________________________
Hand Signals
Several different methods are used school wide to gauge students’ understandings of concepts within a lesson. Hand signal quick checks are a popular formative assessment at Cahaba and heavily involve students in their own self monitoring. For example, “3-2-1” is a formative assessment where students hold up three fingers if they got it, two if they are a little confused, and 1 if they don’t get it. Another hand signal is “Thumbs.” Students will give a thumbs up if they get it or a thumbs down if they don’t. 3-2-1 and Thumbs are concept building formative assessments. They are utilized several times in one lesson to make sure students are building strong understandings of concepts.
Quick Shares
For more complicated concepts in a lesson, teachers tend to use quick checks that require an explanation or a summary. For example, “Quick Shares” are quick checks in which a teacher asks students a question during class discussion to check their understanding of a concept and the students answers question. “Turn and Share” is similar. In these quick check assessments, students turn to a partner and each take 30 seconds to summarize or explain a concept. While students are sharing, teachers circulate around the room and address any misconceptions students might have.
Quick check assessments allow teachers to adjust instruction and clear up misconceptions in the moment and allow students to build an accurate conceptual understanding in order to meet a lesson target or objective.
Quick Share Formative Assessment
AFTER THE LESSON - MISSION ACCOMPLISHED ASSESSMENTS
All the quick checks that are done throughout a lesson are to build the conceptual knowledge or skills required to meet a lesson’s target or objective. Every lesson at Cahaba has a target or objective. The target or objective defines what the student should be able to do by the end of the lesson. So, the target or objective is the student’s mission for the lesson. To determine whether students have accomplished lesson missions, we give them “Mission Accomplished” formative assessments at the end of a lesson. If students were demonstrating accurate conceptual building during the lesson’s quick checks, then they are usually successful at accomplishing lesson missions. Some Mission Accomplished Assessments include: exit slips, polls, surveys, and journal entries. Mission Accomplished assessments help teachers determine the next steps in instruction and determine whether intervention is necessary.
5th Grade Dividing Whole Numbers Exit Ticket
PRODUCT ASSESSMENTS
Sometimes teachers need to assess a complicated learning target for one lesson or check students concept building between lessons in a unit. Teachers tend to use product assessments for these circumstances. Product assessments are formative assessments in which the student creates a product to demonstrate understanding of complicated concept or multiple concepts. They are the main way in which teachers assess concept building in transdiciplinary STEM units.
4th Grade Topographical Maps
Fourth grade’s Topographical Maps are an example of a product assessment for a transdisciplinary STEM lesson. The lesson objective is, "I can interpret a topographical map.” This is a complicated objective. To accomplish this objective, students must demonstrate their understanding of several connected concepts. To read the map, students need to have a basic understanding of landforms and what the different contour lines, colors, and symbols represent on a topographical map. For their minds to truly engineer the picture of what the map represents, students need to understand how scales work and be able to perform basic math skills to figure out distance and elevation. To assess whether the students could do all of the things needed to understand topographical maps, the teacher had them create a topographic model using a topographic map. Students broke into pairs and each pair was given a different topographical map. Each pair had to create a scaled model of the map’s topography using modeling clay. When all student pairs completed their models, all products were laid out in the room. Students received all the topographical maps and had to match which model represented which map.
4th Grade Topographical Map Product Assessment Pictures
Product assessments like this are used across all grade levels to assess complicated lesson targets, components of a standard, or transdisciplinary STEM goals. Some other grade level examples are the 1st Grade Layers of Earth Product Assessment, the 2nd Grade Measurement Monster Product Assessment, and the 3rd Grade Life Cycles Product Assessment.
BENCHMARK ASSESSMENTS
BENCHMARK ASSESSMENTS
5th Grade Native American Database
_________________________________________
The second level of assessment in our assessment plan is benchmark assessment. Benchmark assessments measure students’ performance over a unit, series of units on a topic, or a trimester. Benchmark assessments are intended to measure students’ progress over a period of time. Benchmark testing allows teachers and students to see how students are progressing in their journey to mastering grade level standards and meeting personal goals. Because benchmark assessments show growth over time, they are very helpful in determining next steps in instructional strategies and in planning intervention and enrichment experiences. To make sure we are getting an accurate picture of student progression, we use several different benchmark assessments including performance assessments, unit tests, projects, and computer testing.
PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT PORTFOLIOS
One type of benchmark assessment we utilize at Cahaba Elementary is performance assessment portfolios. Performance assessments portfolios are a cumulation of work that collectively demonstrate students’ mastery of an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary unit’s content and skills. Performance Assessment Portfolios are actually a series of formative assessments within a large project or unit.
In the 5th grade Native American Database project, students show mastery of Digital Learning and Computer Science Standards by collectively creating a website database using Google Sites. Students are divided into groups and allowed to choose a Native American Tribe of interest. They do internet searches and identify reliable information sources and are required to complete a webpage in the database on their tribe of choice. Each component of information about the tribe uses a different skill or Google App. By completing the component, they demonstrate mastery of the skill. For example, students must embed a video about their tribe’s culture or history. By doing this they demonstrate their ability to embed media into a website. Groups must make a slideshow of cultural artifacts, develop a map using My Maps that point out key locations and their significance, develop a timeline in Google Drawings, export the drawing as a jpeg and upload it to the website, create a Google Sheet about the decline of the tribes’ population and develop graphs or charts with the information and upload it to the site. Each of these components is a formative assessment, with the final project as a benchmark assessment. The portfolio of performance assessments within the project show student mastery of many 5th grade global collaborator and computing analyst standards. Mastery of these standards show that students are making progress towards mastering all 5th grade Alabama Digital Learning and Computer Science standards.
5th Grade Native American Database
5th Grade Native American Project and Formative Assessments
COMPUTER BASED TESTING - AIMSWEB PLUS
We use the AimsWeb Plus program to do formal benchmark assessments of individual disciplines. Currently, we only do AimsWeb Plus benchmark testing for reading and math. AimsWeb Plus assessments are used to evaluate student progression towards the end goal, which is mastering grade level standards, but the results also allow teachers to evaluate instructional methods by identifying trends in test results. For example, if they consistently used one intervention strategy, but collectively their class was not improving, they would research other intervention strategies to use in future interventions.
SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT
SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT
The third level of assessment is our assessment plan is summative assessment. Summative assessments measure student mastery of standards after a unit or at the end of the year. We usually use two types of summative assessment in addition to state testing, project assessments and unit tests.
PROJECT ASSESSMENTS
Project assessments are products that students create to show mastery of an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary unit’s content and skills. With project assessments students create one product that demonstrates that students met objectives across STEM disciplines. For example, second grade students participate in a transdisciplinary habitats unit. The unit is intended to meet several second grade standards in tandem including 2nd grade Science Ecosystems standards, ELA Reading Informational Texts and Writing Standards, Digital Learning and Computer Science Global Collaborator Standards, and Standards for Technological and Engineering Literacy on the natural world and model building. Students practice several processes in this unit in order to demonstrate mastery of the unit’s concepts and skills. The unit starts with an anticipatory set of pictures of different habitats like forests, grasslands, tundras, deserts, mountains, scrublands, freshwater, and marine, in which teachers ask students to discuss what they see and have questions about. Then students categorize characteristics of each habitat and discuss these characteristics. After students have accessed and applied their prior knowledge about the general appearance of a habitat, they dive deeper into understanding how habitats impact animals living there by choosing one animal they want to write a report about in one of the habitats. At this point, students begin the writing process. Students receive a rubric on the things in which they need to report and brainstorm ideas. Then they research and take notes on the animal, organize their notes into a format, write a draft, edit, complete the final copy, and publish the final copy. After reports are published, it is time to assess whether students understood the interaction between animals and ecosystems and impact of ecosystems on an animal’s survival.
2nd Grade Habitats
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
So students use the design process to create a diorama of the animal in their habitat. First, they identify what their model needs to show using a rubric. The model must show the interaction of the animal in the environment or the impact of the environment on the animal. Next, they plan out what this will look like by drawing out a sketch. Then, they create the model using makers' materials and items from home. After they complete the diorama model, they check the model to make sure it meets the rubric requirements. Finally, students set up a diorama gallery in either the cafeteria or library. Parents, teachers, and community members are invited to come to the animal habitat gallery. As guests visit each student’s station, students present their diorama by describing their animal and its relationship with its habitat.
2nd Grade Animal Habitat Diorama Gallery
UNIT TESTS
Unit tests are the other summative assessment we use. Unit tests are traditional tests covering a whole unit of study in one STEM discipline. Whereas project assessments are interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary summative assessments that demonstrate mastery of many different standards across disciplines, unit tests are STEM disciplinary summative assessments. Teachers give unit tests in math, science, and information reading. Each discipline has anywhere from three to six units in a trimester. Unit tests allow teachers and students to see a score that represents students’ percentage of mastery. Teachers use individual student scores to plan enrichment and intervention. They use collective scores to determine instructional strategies and modify unit activities to be more effective and efficient. Students use these tests to determine learning goals and make plans for attaining them.
4th Grade Unit 2a Science Test
Our state summative assessment is the ACAP assessment. It is our state’s annual summative standardized test that assesses student mastery of reading and mathematics standards in 2nd - 5th grade and science standards in 4th grade.
STUDENT SELF ASSESSMENT
STUDENT SELF ASSESSMENT
Data Notebook
_________________________________________
Student Led Conferences
_________________________________________
Student News - Goal Setting Video
51830744051_10613928d7_vm.mp4_________________________________________
Cahaba Elementary School students collect all of their assessment results in a data notebook starting in Kindergarten or the moment they transfer to Cahaba. Each year they add to the notebook until they leave Cahaba Elementary after 5th Grade. They use the data from their assessments to set goals, self monitor, self-assess, evaluate their own performance, and collaborate with teachers on next steps. Then, they participate in student-led conferences with their parents to report their progress, successes, and plans for improvement.
DATA NOTEBOOKS
We believe in teaching the whole child at Cahaba. STEM Education is not just about the STEM disciplines it is also about teaching them the 21st Century skills, soft skills, and cross cutting competencies needed to be successful in future STEM endeavors and professions. One of the ways that we do this is with student data notebooks. Students collect a portfolio of data in their notebooks including reading scores, math scores, science scores, and work samples. They complete performance graphs using the data. All students at Cahaba have a data notebook where they collect their own assessment data in order to reflect on what they have learned, set goals, make plans for meeting those goals, and evaluate their success. Data notebooks promote metacognition and self-efficacy in students. Data notebooks get students thinking about the way they think and perform. It gets them interested in how their thinking and performance compares to others and motivates them to engage in investigative activities and class discussions where they can build upon their own thinking processes. When students build upon what they learned from others and then see improvement in their performance, it encourages them to set goals, accept new ways at tackling a problem, and develop innovative ways of solving them. Reflecting, goal setting, planning to meet the goal, and reflecting on whether the plan worked is a crucial process in all fields, but especially in STEM professions where process thinking and out of the box problem solving are necessary.
Examples of a Student Data Binder
Student Virtual Data Binder During Covid
STUDENT LED CONFERENCES
At Open House, parents are invited to the classrooms where their child leads his or her own conference about their performance, evaluation, plans, and goals using their Data Notebooks. Student-led conferences help students learn how to effectively communicate information to others, but more importantly, they put students in the driver’s seat by empowering them to take charge and responsibility of their own learning.
Page updated
Report abuse