Assessment

This assignment was a formative assessment for a 1st grade unit on form using Model Magic. Students explored techniques to shape and manipulate Model Magic into 3 basic forms (a cone, a sphere, and a rope) which could be combined and further manipulated to create more complex forms. After exploring these techniques, students planned 2 ideas for a sculpture that included a larger parent animal and a smaller baby animal that was based on combining these 3 forms, which would provide a guide when students began sculpting. Students were assessed on 3 criteria: their ability to use simple forms to create more complex forms, their ability to brainstorm multiple ideas as part of the creative process, and their ability to visualize and render a 3D object from the front, side, and back, to begin thinking not just in 2D drawings, but in 3-dimensional space, which is what the art element of form is concerned with.

This assessment demonstrates performance indicator 7J, which states that 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." Based on their plans, I was able to assess whether or not students were making the connection between the exploration of simple forms that we were doing with the Model Magic, and the skill of using those simple forms to create more complex forms, like the ears of a cat or the spines of a hedgehog. I determined that several students still needed support to make that connection explicit, and during the next class, I re-modeled making forms and putting them together to form the animal, referencing my planning sheet to figure out how to do so. Using the result of the assessment, I decided that modeling would be the most effective strategy to re-teach, and broke the demonstration down to create a more explicit connection between the simple forms, the planning, and the sculpture. 

These assessments were given as part of a unit on line. The first was a group formative, where, following instruction on the element of line as "a dot that went on a walk," or "a moving point," or "a connection between two points," students were instructed to find as many  different ways to connect point A to point B as they could. Following this assessment, students individually created a coloring sheet using at least 2 different types of lines, which I scanned and printed to be used by the class during free draw time. What I found was that while the class knocked it out of the park on the formative, many of them struggled to incorporate more than one line in their coloring page; based on the formative data, I decided that this wasn't because students didn't understand how to create different types of line, but rather that the skill of determining when to use different types of line effectively wasn't developed yet, and that I hadn't made the explicit connection between the skills involved in the formative assessment and the skills involved in the summative. Students shifted gears from "making different fun kinds of lines" to "drawing using  a 'drawing line,'" and to solve this, I needed to more explicitly point out how different types of line are used by artists in drawing. I made an additional example, following the cute, cartoonish style that many students preferred, to demonstrate how varying my lines improved my coloring page, and many students revised their coloring pages to create a similar effect. 

This demonstrates indicator 7Q, which states that the competent teacher, "appropriately uses a variety of formal and informal assessments to evaluate the understanding, progress, and performance of an individual student and the class as a whole." I used both formative and summative assessments in two different forms (informal exercise and an authentic performance project-based assessment) to monitor progress as a group and individually. I used this data to evaluate understanding, and determined that students were not making the connection, and I needed to reteach to help develop the skill I was targeting, as there was a gap in my instruction that needed to be filled.