The competent teacher understands and uses appropriate formative and summative assessments for determining student needs, monitoring student progress, measuring student growth, and evaluating student outcomes. The teacher makes decisions driven by data about curricular and instructional effectiveness and adjusts practices to meet the needs of each student.
Link to my quiz!
Link to Test Analysis Report!
This artifact was created for my Educational Psychology class in which we were asked to take a chapter from our textbook and create a quiz with eight multiple choice questions and two essay questions. The questions for the quiz had to be at the Application level of Bloom's Taxonomy or higher and our distractors and correct answers had to be supported by reasoning using the text. The next segment of the project included finding the individual scores of the test takers using percentages, z scores, and T scores as well as finding the mean, median, mode, range, and standard deviation. From there, I talked about how the class did as a whole and analyzed why their scores were what they were. After that, I analyzed two students; one who had the highest score and one who had the lowest score. I looked into what went well and what went wrong for them and what I can do for them following this quiz.
This artifact connects to standard 7 of the Illinois Professional Teaching Standards because it connects to performance indicators 7J, 7M, and 7O. Performance Indicator 7J states, "the competent teacher uses assessment results to determine student performance levels, identify learning targets, select appropriate research-based instructional strategies, and implement instruction to enhance learning outcomes" (Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 7J). This artifact does this because it used the assessments of the students scores for the quiz to determine how well the students were doing in the class. From there, I could determine based off of the assessment what learning strategies should take place to enhance the student's learning outcomes, specifically, for the two focus students. The artifact connects to 7M because it shows maintenance of "useful and accurate records of student work and performance" (Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 7M). For this artifact, I had to create a chart showing the percentage, z score, and T score for all of the test takers. Having the data organized, I can later go back into it and find comparison to how the test takers did during this first quiz and compare it to later tests and quizzes. By using z scores and T scores, I can see how well the students did performance wise and how they can improve. 7O states, "the effective teacher effectively uses appropriate technologies to conduct assessments, monitor performance, and assess student progress" ((Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 7O). The artifact used Google Forms, Google Docs, a standard deviation calculator, and a z score calculator from the internet to gather information about student progress which was collected onto a Google Doc where it was then analyzed in order to assess student progress and maintain a page where performance could be monitored.
From this project, I learned that there is much more going on when assessing students than I previously thought. Even in a relatively small assessment, there can be a lot learned about student progress that can be looked into more deeply to help understand how to help students enhance their learning. I also learned about why it is important to track students progress and analyze data. Looking at the mean, z scores, and t scores specifically helped me understand better how my students did in actuality. Using the data from the individuals helped me understand how to help the individual students and using the data from the class as a whole helped me understand what I could do better as a teacher for the entire class. After doing this project, I feel more equipped as an educator on how to grade, assess, and help my students in the future.