Assessment in the classroom is happening all the time and vital to effective teaching. Even subconsciously I find myself checking students' work to see if they would benefit from more practice or are ready to move on. I have found that assessments do not have to be long and tedious, but rather something as simple as a quick thumbs up or thumbs down from students helps me know more about my class. One of the other ways I incorporated informal assessment on a regular basis was by using whiteboards in math. In second grade we work a lot with 2-digit and 3-digit addition and subtraction. While some students are confident in this skill right away, others learn it in their own time. Having students use their whiteboards for warm up problems at the beginning of math, gave me a daily update of students' progress. I would write a problem on the board and they would solve it on their own. Once done, they would hold up their boards with their work for me to check. This allowed me to give every student immediate feedback so they too had a better awareness of their level of understanding (5.5). 

Assessment Within Curriculum

While simple assessment can be extremely helpful, gathering data over time gives me a more accurate picture of where students are in comparison to where they have come from. This kind of assessment is built into the 95% Phonics program Vieja Valley uses, and I have learned how the data gathered can be tracked and used to influence instruction. On a weekly basis this looks like students orally practicing phoneme substitution, writing dictated sentences, breaking apart multi-syllable words, and taking spelling tests that help serve as informal, formative assessments. At the end of the five-week units, students take a longer test where the skills and concepts previously practiced and informally assessed are evaluated in a more formal manner. On average these tests have seven sections, each allowing students to show what they can apply from their learning. Each section starts with a sample question that we do as a class and then students complete the rest of the section on their own. I think that completing an example together helps students know what exactly is expected of them and limits errors due to misunderstood directions. When the test is done, they are then scored using the 95% Phonics rubric so that scoring is consistent. These two things provide more accurate data as tests are given and graded in a reliable way each time. 

After all that comes what I think is the most important part of assessment: looking at the data. Assessment without application is somewhat meaningless. I was able to participate in the meetings the second grade teachers had after each unit test and discuss the trends we were seeing. This was helpful to see if there were areas the whole class was struggling and if we needed to rethink how we taught these topics. It also gave us time to discuss individual student progress (5.1, 5.2). 

Variety in Assessment

As mentioned above, technology based assessment can be very convenient, but this was not the only form of assessment I found myself using with this class. Due to planning a literacy related unit for the CalTPA, I was able to think through what self editing and assessing would look like at a second grade level. I designed the rubrics below, one tailored for students to use while checking their own work and one for me, as the teacher, to use to assess a final draft. The student rubric is a simplified version of the teacher rubric. This helps students know what their work will be checked for and keep the expectations consistent (5.1).