Qualitative Evidence of Academic Growth

When assessing students on mastery around a concept, it is important to create an exemplar that outlines the specifics of what I hope students retained and were able to identify. The rubric assess students on four key points; neatness and organization, accuracy of vocabulary use and content, grammar and punctuation and effort of completion. I did not assess students on spelling because first graders are still learning how to sound out words and write words phonetically. The goal of the assessment was for students to identify similarities and differences they remembered from the text and I wanted to keep that the main focus of the rubric.

Student 1 scored a 10/12 on her beginning-of-unit assessment. She scored a 2 on neatness, a 3 on accuracy, a 2 on grammar and punctuation and a 3 on effort of completion. Student 1 is typically a high performing student, who completes her work quickly and accurately. Sometimes, due to her quickness in completing her work, she makes silly errors that she would have caught if she went back and revised her work. During Student 1's feedback conference, we discussed going back and checking her work and slowing down just a little bit when completing assignments. A few of the errors she made around capitalization could have been fixed if she were to slow down slightly when writing. We also discussed glows and grows. Student 1's glows were accurately identifying similarities and differences as well as independently sounding out her words. Her grows were to elaborate when identifying similarities and differences by being more specific, adding details and including text evidence.

Student 2 scored a 7/12 on his beginning-of-unit assessment. He scored a 1 on neatness, a 2 on accuracy, a 1 on grammar and punctuation and a 3 on effort of completion. Student 2 is a lower performing student, who started the year off below the first grade level, but has made significant growth throughout the year. He takes feedback very seriously in order to perfect his work. Student 2 has also shown signs of struggling with comprehension throughout the year, which is something we have been working hard in class to master. I remind him frequently to go back to the text to find answers to comprehension questions. During Student 2's feedback conference we discussed his glows and grows across his work. He successfully completed the assignment independently and sounded out his words by himself. Additionally, he accurately identified two similarities that we had discussed throughout the lesson. For his grows, we reviewed the vocabulary word differences and he was put in a small group to review this concept, as he struggled to accurately identify differences throughout the story. Additionally, I asked him to be more specific throughout his assessment and instead of writing "they" state who "they" is referring to. Lastly, we discussed sentence structure, capitalization and punctuation.

Student 3 scored a 10.5/12 on his beginning-of-unit assessment. He scored a 3 on neatness, a 2.5 on accuracy, a 2 on grammar and punctuation and a 3 on effort of completion. Student 3 is typically a higher performing student when he concentrates and ignores other distractions. He frequently participates in discussions and loves to read. During Student 3's feedback conference we discussed his glows and grows across his work. He successfully completed his work within the allotted time and ignored other distractions happening in the class. He was very neat with completing his work and did an excellent job sounding out words. Even though not all of the words were spelled correctly, it was easy to understand what he meant. He accurately identified one similarity and one difference. His second similarity was almost there but needed additional details from the text. His grows included identifying differences across the two texts. In one of his differences, he states that neither story had a dragon, but did not identify something that happened in one story, but not the other. We reviewed how to identify characters, setting and plot in order to help him better identify a second difference. Finally, we reviewed sentence structure and I reminded him to always end a sentence with a period. We talked about going back and checking his work to fix this little details to help him move from a 2 to a 3 within the grammar and punctuation section.

The end-of-unit rubric is identical to the beginning-of-unit rubric. Again, the rubric assess students on four key points; neatness and organization, accuracy of vocabulary use and content, grammar and punctuation and effort of completion. My hope was to see growth between the beginning of the unit to the end of the unit within all four of these sections.

Student 1 scored an 11/12 on her end-of-unit assessment. She scored a 3 on neatness, a 3 on accuracy, a 2 on grammar and punctuation and a 3 on effort of completion. Although she still has room to grow with her grammar and punctuation, she showed the most growth in neatness. Even though she scored a 3 on accuracy for both assessments, she showed growth within the section by including specific details from the text evidence. The grammar and punctuation errors are minimal and will be an easy fix for her to do. We will continue to talk about slowing down, checking your work and referring back to the text to minimize grammar errors such as capitalizing the title of the book.

Student 2 scored an 11.5/12 on his end-of-unit assessment. He scored a 3 on neatness, a 2.5 on accuracy, a 3 on grammar and punctuation and a 3 on effort of completion. He showed immense growth throughout this unit both within his grammar and punctuation and with his overall understanding and mastery of similarities and differences. The small group practice really helped his ability to accurately identify similarities and differences across two texts. Not only was he able to identify specific differences this time around, but he compared the texts together to explain how it was a difference. For his second difference he states that Hu Gu Po is a tiger and not a wolf, which shows his understanding and ability to identify differences across two texts.

Student 3 scored an 11.5/12 on his end-of-unit assessment. He scored a 3 on neatness, a 2.5 on accuracy, a 3 on grammar and punctuation and a 3 on effort of completion. He was really close to scoring a 3 with accuracy, but grouped his two similarities together. When conferencing with Student 3, post assessment, he stated that he thought his similarities were two separate ones because he gave details around the character in the story. I understand where he was coming from and pushed him to think more deeply about other similarities we talked about within the story. I think sometimes it can be intimidating for students to have to write multiple sentences, but I expressed to him that is how I see if you've understood and comprehended the concept of similarities and differences. Additionally, the similarities and differences he identified had much more detail and he expressed differences across the text. Something we had talked about in his initial conference is making sure to identify something that happened in one story, but not the other. He was successfully able to do this during the end-of-unit assessment. Student 3 showed the most growth with his grammar and punctuation. He went back to check his work to make sure he had added periods at the end of the sentences.