To begin I would like to speak about my experience during my Three-Week Pre-Internship block. I am so incredibly happy to report that I had the best experience! I learned so much and had the most wonderful cooperating teacher to work with. She was so open to allowing us to try new things surrounding both lesson planning and assessment. Through this openness to try new things, I learned that assessment is so challenging. I often found that I would set out to assess students in a way that made sense during the lesson planning stage, but in actuality it just did not work. I found this process of trial and error around assessment frustrating, but overall very rewarding when I began to discover what worked best for me as well as my students. I am looking forward to diving deeper into the assessment methods I used as well as reflecting on assessments that might have worked better in my Assessment Plan Demonstration!

I found this week's class very interesting for many reasons. However, the number one reason was because I began to look at standards for assessment differently. This thinking began to change when looking at the Fractions Activity that we took up in this week's class. In this activity I scored a 290. In the beginning of the activity I was doing very well, however this started to change as the questions became harder and I had not done this kind of math in so long. This got me thinking about the use of standardized tests that are used to gain insight of a large group of students (provincial, national, and even global). Though it is different as a 20 year old doing math I hadn't thought about in several years, it still got me thinking about how time could drastically impact the results of these tests. If one group of students did their fractions unit closer to the time of the test, they might do much better than students who have had other units in between. I feel that this could make the results of these tests become less reliable than they otherwise could have been. 

Along with wondering about the ways data could be skewed by time, I also wondered about the ways assessment of the same material can change depending on the assessor. In large scale standardized testing large groups of people get together to form the assessment tool, making a tool that remains consistent for all students completing the test/activity. But, this is different on the smaller classroom scale. For the most part the classroom teacher creates their own assessment tool based on the activity being taught. Due to this the ways students are being assessed can vary from classroom to classroom. I came to this conclusion when I was doing the Fractions Points activity. My partner and I came up with a method for assigning points to each question. We decided that the level of difficulty played a smaller part in assigning points than the number of steps a question requires. A greater amount of steps in one question made it worth more points as each step can receive a mark upon completion. We thought this was more reflective of the students' work, making it easier to gain partial points. 

The ways assessing can vary on the same assessment was so interesting to me. It isn't often that I think about the ways teachers vary in their values when assessing. We have our own beliefs behind assessment that weigh differently to others beliefs and values. So, no matter how consistent our own assessment might be, it will never be totally consistent with others. This is why co-construction of assessment tools and conducting assessment alongside others (parents, students, teaching partners) can be so useful.

Moving into the final week of classes I have a plan for completing all of my course work. Throughout the week I will be periodically updating my e-portfolio with my Assessment Literacy Quis Pt. 2, My Five Big Ideas, as well as my various assessment sheets and interview preparations! I am looking forward to this final piece of the semester and can not wait to complete this course. 

😊💛😎